There has been a lot of hullaballoo recently around Farcaster allegedly lacking "interesting content." This all stemmed from a cast by FC founder Dan Romero that was mostly taken out of context, in my opinion. When pressed about why his app wasn't growing faster, he replied "Not enough interesting content."
For what it's worth, I think this is a perfectly fine and honest thing for the founder of a social network protocol to say, and it fits perfectly with his constant contention that he considers Farcaster to be "default dead" until and if it successfully scales. This "interesting" comment, as I took it, was just another observation on the difficulty of scaling anything, really. He's not saying "everyone here sucks", he's saying "if we want growth, we need many more interesting people creating a lot more interesting content." Of course we do!
However, some took this opportunity to self-flagellate and wax poetic about how everyone who was early on Farcaster was basically just lucky and doesn't bring anything interesting to the table. Good engagement-bait perhaps, but ultimately very far from the truth in my experience. I have met so many smart, ambitious, quirky and kind people on this app, and while I agree with Dan that we still need many, many more... blanket dismissing the people that made this app special in the first place is not the wei.
And so, to try and help in some small fashion, I've decided to attempt to shine a light on some of the people whose content and company I have found the most valuable in my time here by posting a short daily spotlight, every day, on one person that I believe is worthy of the title "Farcaster VIP (Very Interesting Person)."
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There is perhaps no better person to start this series with than Mr. Purple himself -- Chris Carella (@ccarella.eth.) With an FID of 472, you know this guy has been on Farcaster long before it was cool. In fact, he was so early here and loved it so much that he helped to found a nounish DAO all about supporting Farcaster builders; /purple DAO, which has raised over 100 ETH from daily auctions to fund all kinds of contributors to the protocol. In fact, alongside Octant, they are rewarding Farcaster-native builders with 10 ETH right now via Rounds.wtf in the /purple channel.
Chris is a great person to follow here because he is a very kind and genuine soul, and he is always cooking up something new and interesting. He believes strongly in enabling permissionless building, upholding Ethereum-first principles, and supporting builders and creators whenever he can. He is one of the most positive sum thinkers I've met, and it's very refreshing.
Chris has been an active and engaged participant in /nouns (where we met) and he's always contributing his voice in governance and helping new people get involved in the community. (He was even awarded a Noun for his contributions.)
He also founded a collective called /energy, all about supporting artists in the Zora ecosystem. And speaking of artists, Chris is a very talented one in his own right. Check out his Zora profile for a taste of his creative output.
Even at his day job with Charmverse, he has constantly been a source of edification for builders in this space, keeping them up to date on available grants from across all onchain ecosystems and even partnering with Optimism to deploy a bespoke site for the SUNNYs Award Show applications recently. The latter initiative was a blending of worlds for Chris, who is also an Optimism Badgeholder and has volunteered countless hours to help adjudicate previous rounds of Retro PGF.
Most recently, Chris has taken on a new challenge with his Charmverse colleagues, launching a new app today called "Scout Game", which aims to gamify the discovery and proliferation of open source software.
If you want to learn more about Chris directly from the source, he was one of the earliest guests on my CC0 video podcast Zero Rights Reserved, or ZEROPOD for short, and if you haven't seen that interview, it's definitely worth a watch. You can view and collect it for free on Zora here.
Follow Chris on Farcaster @ccarella.eth if you like learning and hearing about: art, open source software, grants programs, optimism, nouns, and more.
-TH
