q/dau
the poll above was initiated recently due to scattered discussion of engagement following the recent hub update (a very astute maneuver against an exhausting creator economy). it seems to be the beginning of the end of the summer lulls, among some encouraging economic news, but the sentiment on crypto-centric social media has consistently exuded negativity.
> get confirmation of ETF launch
> paint a red candle
Truly God’s least favourite creation
643
satirically, I think many are cognizant of the cycle being uncomfortable at this point, and the content is just time-consuming levity. I wonder if memetically, Farcaster matures to also have such acerbic tolerance to social volatility. what Farcaster definitely needs at the moment, however, is further targeted recruitment of specific minds & scenes. in fact, it will be an ongoing challenge for years, imho, before Merkle Manufactory can 100% claim to search a preexisting scene in the dark forest & export its network to Farcaster such that the f/scene is "viable". there's also a perennial question of whether channels should senesce, in other words, shouldn't the network be deliberate to dispose of low-performing or misperforming parts?
the truly vexing question of Warpcast & all other services of Farcaster is whether they collectively attain experience parity with the rest of the world, and frames for now are a step forward, but not a balanced replacement for things such as a dedicated microtransacted castle-builder or videodrip like tiktok. for some reason, crypto twitter has not migrated (again) to an "industrious front page", given the economic security of "socialfi" for the coming months, if not years.
tbf, the tooling exists and is growing out:
third-party extensions like automod.sh, frames.sh, and many, many others
dedicated third-party clients like Supercast, unlonely.app, and farhouse.club
generative tools like paragraph.xyz, docs.fileverse.io, snippets.so, and others
Farcaster must contain every flavor of the "industrious" front page, while Warpcast might be just the "tranquil" front page. this quandary is "polygenous", in other words requiring multiple teams with focused bandwidth. it may start with third-party repos & similar tooling fanning out from Merkle's feature specifications. it may very well require scaling/privacy like Farquest L2 (https://docs.far.quest/docs/layer2 / https://github.com/wieldlabs/superhub) or (https://blog.vrypan.net/2024/06/26/farcaster-l2/)
in the pursuit of q/dau & survivability, Farcaster may encounter ideahazards that compound among us. there do have to be some unifying factors, perhaps some that are capital-intensive & counterintuitive. point being, a robust enough tokenomics system may serve the larger picture while also serving its ostensible entertaining factor, and ultimately, drive the changes on Farcaster that make it long-lasting and expansive.
Moxienomics = f(GFP)?
Moxienomics are pretty simple to explain. meaningful engagements = fungible tokens, bonding fungible tokens = meaningful claimable services for more skin in the game. the more activity there is, the more Moxienomics drives recirculation & deposition of Moxie into meaningful impact to the Farcaster network, and through the network of services, the real world.
certain augmentations come to mind almost immediately, such as driving engagement to niche consumables like "let's-plays". Moxie & Farcaster Fan tokens could be used in conjunction for some "Proof of Moderator" Farcaster L2, while also driving further development of usecases that scale the network to subcultures and scenes that remain confederally aligned to Moxienomics out of self-interest. all in all, Moxienomics is a weeks-long launch that will reveal and clarify itself over time, but if the current community rallies to build around this, we'll be more likely to observe a self-reinforcing, longterm bandwidth besides Merkle Manufactory working in all directions from a public repository. in the longterm, we should aspire to realize a network that is hardened to fragmentation, and bonding incentives may, if properly designed & guided, serve that purpose. oh, and John Nash would probably be interested in how the Farcaster Fan token itself can be "restaked" for digital services.
meaningful product
what a short passage for tokenomics, right? wrong; that's all I can write on tokenomics so far.
the majority of this enterprise drops onto the Farcaster community to realize, and Farcaster has yet to achieve critical mass for attention that can be be virtually sustained into perpetuity, all other things being constant. there's also the grace period of currently hidden parts of Moxienomics yet to surface, much like there are public figures yet to immigrate to catalyze this enterprise.
besides, all of this is speculation beyond what I can plan to do with FIP-02 domains I've created so far, and how they might be Schelling points for different pursuits:
f/manufacturing- https://warpcast.com/~/channel/manufacturing
•Don't do anything fancy.
•Don't invent any new technology.
•Don't over automate.
•Don't start with 5 axis aerospace, do 2 and 3 axis commodity level parts.
•Just execute insanely well on the…
Farcaster will benefit from specialized, esoteric STEM communities. specialized, esoteric STEM communities like Open Ecology will benefit from active distribution. shop kids will benefit from a constructive social network that demonstrates compatibility with those procedures.
VCs and related channels like f/venturecapital should not sleep on a channel dedicated to gigafactory-related subjects. or education-adjacent channels like f/codeslaw, or f/synthesis. there's something to be said, as yet another picks & shovels, of the vast possibility of more nominally procuring the power & data for AI training markets.
f/signet- https://warpcast.com/~/channel/signet
farwalks are a really good idea. the good vibes were palpable. they should be easy to stereotype.
meanwhile, recurrent farcaster-sourced activities IRL can be validated in many informal ways, such as everyone in a small group constantly taking group selfies while wearing the same hats. this can then be retroactively incentivized, perhaps even recursively as well. maybe it can be more sophisticated, like everyone streaming from go-pros to the same unlonely channel.
there's quite a few preexisting personal effects that are further tech-capable, such as airpods broadcasting headtracking data, or smart rings with somatic data, and many other cases. there should be a Farcaster-aligned, Ethereum-aligned apparatus for guaranteeing that our personal effects are as privacy-preserving & beneficial as we choose to express. at the same time, I think the network is extensive enough to allow for a market of public space mappers, or interrogative traces of new AI pendant-style paraphernalia, perhaps even the best-in-class, prescription-capable medical model. clothing & consumer electronics seem to be lindy areas for both tech and culture, so f/fashion should be complemented by as many experiments.
the other point, that this shop currently demonstrates as of writing this, is fulfilling public goods funding standards like the Protocol Guild Pledge & equivalent to the Purple DAO, while being a permission market itself. the remaining slices can be distributed to multiple parallel governance methods. they can even be distributed along localized versions of the same product, to each analogous supplier. many such cases, many such worthy public goods.
but what about ethOS (https://www.ethosmobile.org/)? I think the cynics who sell memecoins despite their underlying public goods deeply undervalue the lucrative, cost-collapsing feedback of an ecosystem that has resolved the price discovery of sustaining those public goods. if channels like f/signet can fund app development on ethOS, by extension such sources can drive upstream targets like Android forks. strategically, what is good for the open, mobile OS will be accretive of consumers used to mobile OS despite closed access. so I think f/signet will leverage Moxienomics in such a way that it accretes to that wide open range of hardware, including many personal effects, but especially bootstrapped from ethOS.
f/onframe-gaming- https://warpcast.com/~/channel/onframe-gaming
if Farcaster really wants to reach experience parity with the competition-hardened, attention-seeking internet, it's going to have to support dopaminergic, html5 experience that's coherent with protocols like Moxie, and operating systems like ethOS. like all other channels mentioned here, the demonstrative goal is for nonoverlapping subgroups of Farcaster to moderate these with industrial-grade focus on the respective enterprise. these all can be greatly improved/incentivized to produce q/dau, but regardless of the abstractions we will arbitrate balkanization/arbitrage/exfiltration risks. for now, it's important to emphasize that Gold exists as a Farcaster-native gaming L3, so best to populate that with services like Airstack & Neynar as well as other protocols.
f/kardashev - https://warpcast.com/~/channel/kardashev
besides channels like f/outercorps & f/space, I have a sort of opinionated view of the attainment of K1, often with the stated maxim that it is simpler to approach K1 from a K2 mindset than from sub-K1 praxis. which reductively is whatever rideshare can progressively become components to a Dyson cloud (I often picture a circuit, like a Mars-Earth cycler or the assisted trajectory of the Parker Solar Probe). onboarding a subset of hobbyists like SatNOGS, ipnsig, or DAO-incubated work like clockwork (in lunar time) might be sufficient for a new farcaster-compatible registry of oracles, as well as a figurative foothold for farcaster-interfacing satellite communication. hyperstitioning K2 infrastructure is a way to underwrite paths through K1, and we should hope that with the timing of the next few years and current technological acceleration both can be tailwinds for this social network at the leading edge, provided it is memetically fit to those circumstances. oh, and I think assignments of kardashev.eth subdomains alongside Hats Protocol role experimentation would be cool.
f/codeslaw- https://warpcast.com/~/channel/codeslaw
speaking of circumstances, fortune favors the prepared. and one of the unavoidable circumstances of URL -> IRL, especially for more ambitious events & places, is the growing need for the Farcaster legal community to coordinate the purpose-specific entities that can serve these goals beyond ideation & onchain formation. for example, should there be a boom throughout 2025, we should learn from experiments like CityDAO, Zuzalu, cabin.city, evaluate the current landscape, and develop ways to extend beyond with adjusted resource constraints. if successful, it becomes more likely to incubate fablab, reprap, armstand, etc as enterprises rewarded from the social feed.
this is also an opportunity for purposebound agents, and MPC overall, to compound "codeslaw" as a critical academic subject, sourced from Farcaster, that yields many different kinds of legal wrappers and computation rights, even perhaps legislature & due process that is fully, technologically contemporaneous, at all scales of government. the tools that can be built for correspondence, arbitration, and rehypothecation may not seem obvious at the moment, but as demand flows, I hope that it can be incubated in f/codeslaw from the household, neighborhood, and upwards.
f/scaffold- https://warpcast.com/~/channel/scaffold
I hope to get as much of the preexisting BuidlGuidl onto f/scaffold moderation, as much as I'd like to spark growth in the broader channel engagement. someone did build a abi.ninja frame (https://github.com/BenraouaneSoufiane/abininjaframe), though an action is the current standard. again, I think the value of a channel-specific client with protocol-specific actions is a huge benefit to the farcaster network as a whole, since it will free a subculture to moderate a fully farcaster-actualized space, without colliding with polarizing clients. scaffold-eth is an obvious educational Shelling point for Ethereum, and it can also be one for Farcaster. it's also another way to ship PWAs compatible with ethOS, or backup IPFS pages.
f/synthesis- https://warpcast.com/~/channel/synthesis
firstly there's the obvious DeSci angle. if anything, I think there's a dearth of empirical validation for some of these graph-based models that Google AI has produced, related to protein folding or materials synthesis. Farcaster probably would benefit from brain gain in this direction, and a consistent regimen of funding public science in places like post-secondary universities also seems pretty fascinating to me.
furthermore, with the education channels & Moxie, there's a chance to learn from incentivized UX like Duolingo or Khan Academy, perhaps even assemble a complete curriculum of all conventional academia, and use this with permissioning like Hats Protocol or LexDAO to surgically coordinate a "Farcaster encyclopedia" in the abstract, and a "Proof of Eligibility" for practical platforms like Bountycaster or Gitcoin Grants (or any X-to-earn client).
we don't know where the future is headed, but that doesn't mean we can't play the numbers. fostering a meritocratic mobility, directly hardwired into a social network, would not just yield short-term, competitive insight, but might also preemptively demonstrate the challenges to transitioning all of K-12 education in the remaining 20's to a more future-resistant paradigm. optimistically, demonstrating out Hats as well as educational curriculum would be so viable & scalable that the ecosystem quickly shows a better international system that reforms the former. this is the vibe of f/synthesis.
Reflections
it's already been an eventful year, since Farcaster really sped up from its previous state. sufficiently decentralized social networks are still small & fragmented, easily misled by cognitohazards, and precariously funded. Moxie may be any opportunity, before a significant uptrend, to realign the core ecosystem as stewards of sustained "GFP", URL -> IRL.
On an industrial scale, the social network & popular experience of crypto has to come to terms with the cost of maintaining a stack of nodes & hubs, and the eventual cost of who's necessarily trusted, or even more strenuously, a discrete architecture for trustworthiness. I wonder how Moxie will behave generally, but as the Farcaster community spins out multiple multisigs & other objects, who can say which flywheels form over developers? I hope that privacy/scaling benefits upfront, in order to drive further onboarding and usecases. I especially hope that constructive activities over the Farcaster network can trigger onchain rewards, and onchain permissions can scale out constructive moderation.
how will tokenomics like this interface with USDC & platforms like bountycaster? how will DeFi functionality like Opyn's or Reflexer's interface with Airstack frames? especially extra layers of cooperative games like Pooltogether, and extra layers of composability:
skipping forward beyond all of this, the point for Moxie & Farcaster in the short-term is consistent activity. if the memes consistently & effectively hit CT, if Farcaster acclimates further to procedural parent casts, and more communities with curated moderation fill the gaps, a lot can compound towards technical wealth. we can't really expect success on a chart if the enterprise below us is lacking, so the next 6-12 months should be ample time for this or some other developmental gambit to play out.
and it would be prudent to consider that other developmental gambits playing out simultaneously is a Farcaster feature, not a bug, and while concepts like Moxie or Composer Actions play out, there are other factors at play like the general bot orchestration & differentiation. there's also a potential for MPC platforms like Quilibrium to abruptly shift some underlying principle behind gross Farcaster product, in either furtherance or hindrance of Moxie. Hats Protocol might grow quickest top-down, and so would dictate the shape of Moxie, more so than vice versa.
so, for now, I'm going to watch the initial rollout. NFA, DYOR, but more importantly, weigh the purpose of these coming months of development as much as you might value them for fun.
