Worldbuilding 🌍 ✨
For the first time in my life, I am excited to build on social media 🌐
No more bait-and-switch social media platforms, nerfing my reach until I pay for advertising.
No more fracturing my self across 10 platforms, burning out along the way.
I feel as though I can truly build my own world, in public, so others can join me on my journey ✨
Welcome to Worldbuilding 🌍 ✨
Recalibrating Recap 🧭 🧠 ✨
First off, hello to the 32 subscribers who joined me since my first Recalibrating Entry 🧭 ✨ I'm blown away at this response after only one week and greatly appreciate you taking the time to read my words 🫡
For those new here, Paragraph is the medium-form extension of my long-form Recalibrating newsletter currently on Substack & my website:
🧭 Recalibrating = align the self & identify your path forward
🌎 Worldbuilding = practical Recalibrating
The goal of Worldbuilding is to help you build in your unique, calibrated style, leaving a trail for those walking the path behind you so that we can learn in public, together.
To help me build up my own world, please consider joining the /cal channel on FC & sharing this frame/entry with someone who may find it valuable. Word of mouth is the best way to build a world with people who resonate with one another 🤝 ✨
Overview: RSS+ & The Future Of Farcaster Social Graphs
It’s incredibly satisfying to feel that what I am building here on @farcaster is perhaps the last time I will ever need to build on a social network
I realize that sounds like a bold statement, a prediction of the future. Prescience 👀
To help you understand the future as I see it, I thought it would be helpful to take a look back at where Farcaster came from and why the original name of "RSS+" provides a helpful prediction of its future in the creator economy as a whole.
An overview of today's entry:
Problems with current social media;
How Farcaster Social Graph + blockchain integration = solutions;
The context tying the problems to the solutions; and
Why you should care to build your own world rather than stay within the walled worlds of web2.
Let's dive in ✨
The Problems
Cross-posting Burnout: keeping up with each platform requires a ton of work;
High Noise/Low Signal: Very few people engage meaningfully with content, if they do, it’s spread across all social platforms (no feedback = no recalibration);
Poor Payment Rails: It's difficult to directly tip/pay the creator, or very high platform fees (reduced micro-transaction ability);
Low/No Network effect: Algorithmic boosting is usually reserved for large creators (small creators can’t leverage Reed’s Law);
Creators burn themselves out trying to keep up with 10+ social media platforms, each refusing to work with the others. Sure, you can use an aggregator account that cross-posts for you, but the web2 platforms often recognize this 3rd-party posting and algorithmically nerf the posts.
Feedback is an essential part of building your world. If you do not know what your audience values, you can't recalibrate your publishing system to augment the value you are sharing.
Additionally, this feedback is spread across 10+ platforms, making it difficult to keep track. There's no linked social graph. Even if there is feedback, it's usually 🔥🔥🔥... nice, but not helpful.
A primitive of Web2 social media is that it is built to give things away for free. It is an attention-mining system, not a creator-monetization system. Even if there is payment, it is subject to ridiculously high app-store fees (30%) or is incredibly low value. E.g., Instagram now has "stars" for reels, where each star is worth $0.01. Creators get 50 M+ views and earn $0.01 on them...
Finally, for most creators, they do not get the algorithmic boost of network effects. These effects are reserved for creators who will bring in ad revenue, likely with 100,000+ followers. Sure, Metcalfe's law says that the value of a network increases as the square of the # of users of the network, but that is a global network effect, not catered to an individual creator.
The algorithm decides who gets to take advantage of Reed's Law, boosting groups in the network that pay to play (paid vs organic content).
There has to be a better way.
The Solutions
RSS & Simultaneous Omni-Channel Distribution
RSS+ upgrade (Social Graph Engagement Aggregator + Blockchain)
Revenue Share & Blockchain Payment Rails (micro and macro transactions)
Micro-Network Effects With True Fans & True Communities
I'll get more into the details below, but here's a quick overview of each solution:
RSS is a technology that enables simultaneous cross-posting to any number of platforms. Cross-posting like this is referred to as "omni-channel marketing" and is one of the best ways for creators to diversify their posting portfolio. E.g., with my podcast, I can upload it to one location, distribute via RSS, and it is sent to all podcast "readers".
The consumer is able to consume where they like, the creator is able to host where they want. Note: this is referred to as "headless marketplaces", and is how I found Farcaster after reading this Variant article.
RSS+, the original name of Farcaster, got the "+" by adding a social graph to Farcaster, authenticated via blockchain.
The addition of blockchain to Farcaster enables payment rails built into the social graph from the ground up. Verified identity & crypto rails enable instantaneous creator payout and revenue share with fans who promote their creations.
The addition of revenue share gives fans some skin in the game. They are rewarded for sharing the works of creators. When they pay it forward, creators pay it back.
This reciprocity between creator and fan helps build what I call a "True Community". The True Community are the players in the game of the world built by the creator 🌍
This True Community forms micro-network effects that leverage Reed's law, boosting the value of the Creator and the True Fans, simultaneously 🤝
Now, let's dive a little deeper ✨
The Context: RSS
We need to think about the Internet differently if we are to make a true run at decentralized social systems
We need to think in terms of direct linkage between the creator and the consumer in a post-platform manner (independent of the platform the user views the creations on), AKA building for headless marketplaces.
RSS was originally intended to provide this linkage.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and was invented for consumers to directly receive the outputs of creators. (Note, I use the term "creator" for artists, writers, knowledge workers, builders -- people who create and output anything)
Originally, consumers could subscribe to RSS feeds from their favourite blogs and receive the posts in the reader of their choice. The creator and the consumer were directly linked with no intermediary. If a user didn't like the RSS reader anymore, they could move their feed to a different client (reader).
Unfortunately, with the rise of web2 and the associated risks of building on the quicksand of closed-system platforms, RSS lost out to the network effects being generated behind walled gardens.
Web2 social networks used APIs to kill RSS on their platforms, which made it difficult for users to track identities of the people they had followed on, e.g., Twitter.
There was no distributed social graph.
This lack of identity linkages meant that RSS could not keep up with web2 social media platforms as users scaled via network effects in the late 2000's and early 2010's. Users stayed on platform because there was a centralized network effect that boosted their engagement... for the short term.
I get more into RSS and its failure in my long-form newsletter (linked at the end). For now, it's useful to note that RSS technology is still used today for blogs and, perhaps more commonly, podcasts.
The History: RSS+ & Farcaster
RSS failed because there was no way to properly track user identities across the system in a way that maintained the decentralization of RSS itself.
RSS is effectively a system of metadata file usage and information transfer. The information packet goes from one person (the creator) to another (the consumer). Writer 🤝 reader.
There was a direct link between the two.
According to Dan Romero, one of the co-founders of Farcaster, the “+” came from introducing a social graph in a manner that allowed for identity verification across the RSS distribution.
Blockchain enabled the +
By linking an identity to blockchain on the Farcaster protocol, it’s now possible to have a decentralized social graph that receives all posts (casts) on the network, from any source.
With blockchain, any “reader” can check the authenticity of the "writer" (caster) and approve the cast to be added to the Farcaster network.
The powerful part of this system isn’t only with creators distributing their casts to the entire network (though that helps with burnout, they only have to cast once), the powerful part is that the consumer can also verifiably interact (i.e., engage) with the cast, and engagement is logged in the network.
True Community & Micro-Network Effects (Reed's Law)
web3 social graphs enable creators to pay back fans who pay it forward
When using Farcaster (aka RSS+), the social graph is used to verify both the creator and the consumer.
This connection has at least three benefits:
Engagement aggregation;
1-click, in-app purchasing; and
Revenue sharing with fans.
Engagement Aggregation
One of the main reasons I started using Paragraph is that when a Paragraph post is shared as a frame on the Farcaster protocol (e.g., on Warpcast), any comments below that frame get automatically pulled into the comment section of my Paragraph Post 🤯
Feedback from fans is aggregated to a single location for me and others to review and respond.
This feature goes a long way for leveraging the social graph of Farcaster to reduce burnout of creators, enabling them to conserve energy by building community via their own posts, rather than fracture their attention across 10+ platforms.
1-Click, In-App Purchasing = $50+ Billion Formerly Patented Tech
Amazon made many billions from its 1-click checkout patented technology. This same technology is now available within Farcaster via "pay-with-warps", the in-app currency, used in frames.
For more on the value of this system and why I think this is, perhaps, the biggest game-changer to social media since the introduction of video, I have a long-form entry here.
NOTE: frames are getting full transaction support in the near future, which means that in-app payments won't be limited to warps, plan accordingly 👀
Accordingly, creators can create and share a product (e.g., NFT, digital download, print, video) and consumers can instantly purchase that good without leaving the app. Due to the RSS nature of Farcaster, the creator can post this product on any platform linked to the social graph, and the consumer can view the product on any platform linked to the social graph. A headless marketplace.
This direct payment allows for direct micro-transactions in social media. As a consumer, if you come across a value packet that you truly value, you can give $1 (or more) to the creator as a sign of thanks. In return, the creator can give you a token of their appreciation (literally, an NFT).
This builds the creator's 10,000 True Fans. At a few dollars a year, 10,000 True Fans enable sustainable creator monetization.
When added to a subscription system (e.g., Hypersub by Fabric), this consistent low-level monetization can generate sustainable and consistent income (more on this in the next entry).
Revenue Sharing With Your True Community
Now, if the consumer doesn't want to buy the good, but thinks their network would enjoy it, they can reshare the post (recast, quote cast).
Since you are each connected to the same social graph via blockchain authentication, the sharing of the post gets tagged with your unique digital identifier (FID).
If the shared post converts (someone else buys or subscribes), the fan who shared can get a commission for helping to market the creator's work.
When they pay it forward, you can pay it back.
As the creator's community grows, a micro-network forms within the overall Farcaster network, a True Community of fans that help monetize and sustain their creators.
As the network of micro-transactions grows, the creator gets more and more feedback on what works and what doesn't. They're able to recalibrate their system to make it even more valuable.
Eventually, the time will come for the creator to build an even bigger, higher value project. E.g., $500 - $1000 per transaction.
If the creator is able to leverage the micro-network effect they have built with their 10,000 True Fans, ideally, they will be able to find 100 True Fans to buy the high-ticket item. At 100 fans X $500, the creator can make $50,000 in one go. Note, this system can leverage revenue share too, with each transaction earning the referrer $50+.
Effectively, once the micro-network foundation is built, creators can work to have yearly crowdsourced projects that give them financial freedom to continue building their vision, their world, supported by people who have skin in the game, sharing in revenue generated by the continued success of the creator.
Recap
By leveraging an RSS style feed, creators can post in a single location (their website) and immediately distribute reformatted content across all social platforms (this is what Worldbuilding is about).
By introducing blockchain, the RSS feed is upgraded to RSS+, adding a social graph and payment rails.
By adding a social graph and payment rails, creators can: be instantaneously paid, aggregate engagement, and reward their fans for helping with conversion (making sales, increasing subscribers, etc).
By rewarding fans for helping them market (via resharing content), a community is built with a shared interest in seeing the creator succeed. A True Community.
This True Community can generate a micro-network effect, helping scale whatever project the creator is looking to build when they are ready to to level up their world.
A synergistic & sustainable creator economy ✨
An Even Deeper Dive: Building Social Fabric Of The Creator Economy 🟣
The full long-form entry can be read on Substack or wanderloots.com. In this entry, I provide more context and depth on the issues described in this post, including my own current experience with the creator economy and predictive examples on how I see this system developing.
I hope this deeper analysis helps you see the bigger picture of what is being built here. A glimpse of the world I am building 🌍
P.S. Collectibles
There are four ways you can support my writing on Paragraph:
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Any and all support is much appreciated ✨
