On an balmy afternoon in early July, while sitting in traffic on a long drive home, my mind was working overtime gaming out my next investigative reporting story – an expose of a top-secret Pakistani military social media manipulation operation.
While my thoughts drifted miles away from the North Jersey traffic, the buzz of my cellphone jolted me back to the moment. On the phone was a longtime reporting contact (and onetime subject) that I knew from my stories, a social media forensics expert and general techie named Geoff Golberg.
Geoff was returning my own call from earlier that week. I had asked him to get in touch with me to review some information related to the secret program, and to see if he could provide any analysis drawn from his own expertise. After we chatted for a few moments about the report, with him promising to provide me a few quotes, I prepared to hang up and continue my drive.
But before I did, Geoff said that there was something else that he wanted to run by me.
"Hey, you know I'm also on this app called Farcaster, you should really try it, it'd be great if more people like you were using it!," he said.
As is common with me, my thoughts were so consumed with the story that I was working on that I didn't even fully process his comment. I had never really been interested in Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, or any of the other Twitter alternatives (despite my growing dissatisfaction with Twitter) so I had gotten used to tuning out such requests anyways.
Mumbling, that I'd look into it, Geoff then added something that caught my attention.
"There's a crypto part of it too!"
Interesting!
Geoff, who I'd later discover is a voluble presence in the Farcaster community, gave me a few more brief details about the platform and where to sign up. As I merged on to the highway exit back towards New York, I told him I'd check it out.
That night, before going to bed, I logged into the Warpcast website, paid the nominal five dollar fee to get started, and created my account.
Thus began the journey that surprisingly brought me to writing this post today.
Airdropping on the Boardwalk
I'm a bit of an oddity among non-tech people in that I'm curious about cryptocurrency and blockchain. This is not primarily for purposes of speculation and generating wealth (although those are great), but due to my own moderate libertarian views about privacy and financial sovereignty.
I had worked with Edward Snowden as a journalist years ago, and have met enough refugees and political prisoners to know that being able to safeguard your information and capital in a place protected from political exigency can be solid insurance against future oppression.
This is what I like about crypto, and why I hold my nose about the gauche financialization, rampant scamming, political myopia that otherwise surrounds the industry and continue to pay it some interest.
The first thing I noticed when logging onto Warpcast is that it feels a lot like a much sleeker version of Twitter. The addition of channels makes it easier to segment information, and prevents the informational chaos that Twitter has devolved into today.
Although some people seemingly have hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform, as far as I can tell Farcaster is actually a much smaller community than that. It feels more like a village. Accordingly, I got village-like hospitality upon logging on the first time, with innumerable people sending me personal messages of welcome and even offering to set up calls to help me learn about it. This is certainly a stark contrast to Twitter, which feels more like accidentally walking into a bar brawl.
Another thing I noticed was that people were sending me casts that included the terms HAM, DEGEN, and MASKS. At first I wasn't sure if this was some kind of gesture of respect or insult (300 HAM sent to guy named "Hussain" = Hate crime??), but as it turned out people were kindly sending me "tips" of cryptocurrency as a welcome. Later on, another currency called MOXIE would be introduced whose distribution was even more streamlined into the platform.
I had no idea where I could find this cryptocurrency that was apparently mine, and there was no real explanation from it evident on the platform. But because of my preexisting familiarity with the subject I was able to deduce that these were essentially airdrops that I could claim from my MetaMask wallet.
Because of how atypical it is for a social media platform to generate revenue for its user, I almost couldn't believe this was happening. To prove the concept was real I actually went and claimed these airdrops, swapped them to USDC, and then cashed them out to my bank account.
As it turned, out the cryptocurrency that I was receiving for the mere act of posting – something that comes as naturally to me as breathing at this point – was totally real, liquid, and even had accumulated enough in a week to pay for a pleasant meal out for myself and my wife.
As Sacha Baron Cohen would say, "very nice!"
Cast Away
Warpcast has a relatively narrow range of subject matter being discussed, as the platform mostly seems to consist of people into coding, software, computer science, and other things that are specific to one industry. I get the sense that many people have preexisting relationships IRL, or are at most a degree of separation away. The culture of the platform accordingly feels like an industry networking event, or a lively employees-only corporate Slack channel.
I don't know much about software or computer science so there is not much I can do to join in such conversations. But I do know about reporting, foreign affairs, politics, language, and philosophy, all of which I love to discuss, so I began casting in earnest about those topics. After being kindly gifted thousands of "Warps" by other users welcoming me onboard, I even started my own channel to serve as a platform for global affairs commentary and news updates. At present it has nearly 600 subscribers, and I'm quite pleased with it.
Despite the generally tech-centric nature of the platform, I've also found that there are quite a few people with significant knowledge of literature and politics lurking around here too. I've been surprised on numerous occasions by the erudition and worldliness of a few people I've met on Warpcast – sort of like being at the coffee machine at work and running into someone who had an interesting past life as a journeyman adventurer or literary savant. When there are fewer people in a community, the qualities of each individual person tend to shine through more brightly, and you do find that on Farcaster.
Because its a smaller platform as well, there is less incentive to get into fights, and instead more of a focus on collegial conversation, even on areas of disagreement. I'm a person who has unilaterally injected politics into Warpcast and intruded on peoples discussions of tokens and cryptocurrency market prices, and sometimes it does feel a bit strange doing that. Politics, after all, is inherently polarizing. But although some people do heatedly direct cast me to debate now and then, everyone on the platform is quite relaxed and easygoing in general.
Far(caster) Ahead
Am I going to continue to use Farcaster? Yeah, I think so.
I have around 7500 followers now, many of whom are not bots, and I do feel a sense of responsibility to people who have followed me or tipped me because they like my commentary.
I enjoy casting in general, everything from deep philosophical ruminations to frivolous memes, and I'm enjoying the casual culture of the platform which has less pressure than more developed platforms. Casting is not work, its something I do to unwind, and its great to also get rewarded in DEGEN and MOXIE or whatever else to do what I'd be doing for free on Twitter anyways.
I've frequently offered my unsolicited advice on how to improve Farcaster and I will do that again by saying that to make it popular its important to promote it to people who are outside the world of cryptocurrency and technology generally.
You need what I would call "news influencers." These are people who either report new information like actual journalists, or who simply enjoy discourse and debate and whose presence makes a social media platform a nonstop rollicking conversation, as Twitter was in its heydey.
There is a sort of rivalry between Silicon Valley and journalism, and as I gather Farcaster is somehow part of a broader attempt by SV people to create a new frontier with their own information distribution channels. I have a lot of thoughts about this rivalry, which I find mostly asinine and ego-driven, that I might write about in future. But I don't think that you can really have a social media platform that does not include society as a whole, including all the messy and conflictual parts.
On a personal level, I'm enjoying using the platform and feel gratified to be rewarded and recognized a bit for my casts. When my social media manipulation story eventually came out this August, I made sure to share it in my Warpcast channel right away. I got lots of shocked comments from my followers, who were also interested and supportive when I shared in the days thereafter that the military was now threatening to sue me. (I'm fine by the way.)
I'm going to be dealing with that stuff for awhile now and that may take up some of my focus.
But in the meantime, I'm going to keep posting on Farcaster and engaging with the community. My verdict on the platform? So far, so good.