Culture and Vibes
Aired Date
November 6, 2024
Hosts
Series
Farcaster 101
Episode
Module 5
Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/xwzmWtpS8MUfarcaster 101 is an educational series brought to you by gm farcaster in partnership with snickerdoodle building off of their state of farcaster report which you can access at snickerdoodle.com this 12 part series introduces all aspects of the farcaster ecosystem and helps you get started building your social graph and brand on farcaster
gm farcaster and welcome back to farcaster 101 this is module 5 and we're talking about the culture and vibes of farcaster so this is going to be a fun one i'm excited for this one i'm excited for them all but this one in particular i think is gonna be a little extra fun adrian don't you think so i think so right so you're here with adrian and nana fraff i should have introduced ourselves again so but i think this one's gonna be fun and here we go so we're gonna talk about what is culture kind of give a background of like what we mean when we're talking about culture founder curated culture senious impact of cryptoculture and builder energy and if you have not watched modules 1 through 4 and you're really new to farcaster and you and you're like brand spanking new and don't know what we're talking about i would step back to those if you've been hanging out in farcaster for a while but want to understand a little bit more about the culture and sorta how it was built then this is for you so jump in and adrianne so when we talk about what is culture like what do we mean by that
yes everything we've talked about so far has been all about like the technology behind farcaster what we talked about what is farcaster farcaster frames this about culture is a much softer topic i think it's really interesting so there is no written definition of this is what the farcaster culture is so when we talk about culture it's it's really all of like the unwritten rules and of how anything gets done or how people communicate or the things that people like the things that people don't it's sometimes hard to articulate it's hard to put a finger on it also evolves over time so it's it's really all kind of the the the the soft practices and and kind of how things are done within the farcaster world how things are successful so the reason we wanna talk about culture is because understanding the farcaster culture and what makes farcaster culture unique will really help you be successful in farcaster or if you don't understand it maybe fall on your face we don't want that
we don't want that for you we don't want that for you and i love the idea that you know culture does evolve so what was true 2 years ago on farcaster may or may not still hold because as the platform scales things change new people come in and have their own impact on the culture and we're seeing that constantly so although we're going to talk a little bit about sort of the bedrock foundation and things that you can still see today there's always going to be new impacts that are that are coming in and the other point of like culture is learned and that's why we're here to like talk about it because it is learned it is something that you either dive into or you impact and change one or the other and our culture has been you know the farcaster culture has been curated by the founders the founders are the ones who have brought on the initial group of folks who started using the platform so the farcaster founders are dan romero and varun suresan and i'm butchering that last name sorry sorry varun we just call you v and they curated this early culture of farcaster via invitation because it was not open to everyone for the 1st year year and a half i think
2 years
have been 2 years might even be 2 years i think it was a while
farcaster was founded in 2020 and only became permissionless which means you didn't need a personal invite from the founders in october of 2023
wow so it was a yeah so some time yeah there was some time where you had to get an invitation and a lot of those invitations went out to those who were building who were devs who were building things within the crypto space because the 2 founders come from coinbase so they were at coinbase for about 10 years almost i think and then went on to found farcaster after leaving coinbase so adrianne like i know you have an interesting story of like how you came on to farcaster and what your experience was there so can you share that
yeah well the way dan kind of curated that early audience before farcaster went permissionless was look in the in the first probably year or so he was onboarding his friends his personal network and then maybe went out to his maybe twitter following and he was doing 1 on 1 calls with people to onboard them like it was literally holding people's hands and then the next phase he kinda would put it out there to a more public audience and say hey if people want an invite to farcaster send me a dm and tell me what you're building and that was kind of the gate it wasn't tell me who you know it wasn't tell me where you work so it wasn't kind of credential based it wasn't status based it was just what are you building and i and i think that made for a very very unique culture within farcaster because when i joined farcaster i first of all i was interested in crypto i was not already heavily in crypto i didn't know anybody i just dm'd him and i said hey dan i'm these are the blogs i'm writing by the way i also wasn't a developer i i he was primarily i thought looking for people who are building you know like as a developer in crypto i had done a lot of blogging and one of the things i thought was unique was like it it wasn't just developers that were early on it was like anyone building anything like that definition of builder was pretty broad so if you were an artist or a writer or musician or just a founder just kind of anyone who was building something then he let you in so that early audience tended to be people who all identified as a builder and and i think that really that that focus on builder and culture really set the early
early values i'd say of the community which tend to be like an if you're a builder you tend to have more of a positive sum mindset you tend to be more generous with other builders you tend to understand that building is really hard being in the arena is really hard so when people make mistakes you're a little more gracious with them so it created a really i think whatever the opposite of toxic and supportive are yeah supportive community yeah
a supportive community that supports those who are build building and trying and who are entrepreneurs in the space and i think you see that here with what dan said here what i think about farcaster is we wanted to build a crab a i'm having a hard time reading i
mean this you don't have to read glasses on
i know isn't it said this quote
the way i think about farcaster is we wanted to build a credibly neutral social network that means developers have permissionless access to everything on the network can permissionlessly build on the network and ultimately if it works it provides distribution importantly that distribution belongs to the person doing the distributing
and and dan dan did early on with farcaster focus on farcaster as a protocol should be neutral yes dan and varun are building workcast which is one client but he really wanted to attract a lot of developers who wanted to build on top of farcaster and the idea is lots of different developers can build on farcaster there can be lots of different clients apps the more people who build the more people it draws into the network the bigger your distribution is and it creates a very virtuous cycle of developers build on farcaster grows the network more developers wanna build on farcaster the network keeps growing more developers wanna build and you end up with a very rich ecosystem of lots of clients with client diversity and lots of other different apps that will be built on top of farcaster
and all those apps and all that building has an impact on the overall culture as well so one of the things that i said in the state of farcaster report was farcasters builder energy is intoxicating a business looking to engage early adopters will find beta testers galore who offer useful feedback and are happy to jump in and try something new and we've seen this over and over again and we're going to talk about some of the specifics around that and specific case studies of those who have built on the rails of farcaster or have used it sort of as a jumping off point to be able to find those who would use their product and give them feedback and we'll talk about that in our next module and also i want to point out the snickerdoodle state of forecast report has a lot of great stats and quotes around this topic as well so building in public is a big part of the farcaster culture as well can you wanna dive into this a little bit
adrienne yeah we're highlighting this cast from inari who lists many reasons why you wanna build in public and we're saying to get valuable feedback it helps you stay accountable you're attracting collaborations you're documenting your journey you can iterate on your messaging building community you build your user base you inspire others and lastly it's just more fun and because forecaster has this permissionless nature because it's an invitation for developers to build you just tend to just see a lot of people building in public which means people are more vulnerable if you're building in public it means you're gonna make mistakes in public and and because it's such a supportive culture
people feel fine to do that and and and you end up getting better for it so you are able to ship early mvps and early iterations of your product even when they're not perfected because people want to be early adopters give you feedback so then you can kind of iterate quickly and and improve your product with real users
i think because so
many oh founders say there's so many founders in farcaster that yeah founders understand other founders need feedback and need you know direct access to users and not wait and not be filtered so it's just it's a really great place to to build in public with other builders
and i think that it's important to know too i think this is very much coming from the crypto culture and we see a lot of overlap where transparency is appreciated building in public is appreciated and aniri who works with base base has been who's which is the l two from coinbase since they started building base they've been directly sharing a lot of that journey on farcaster and sort of bringing in that user base into base as well so that has been part of their journey and they're sharing what they've learned as well and why that's been important to to their building and this is from rish who has been building nanar since 2023 and before we it was before permissionlessness of the of the whole entire farcaster ecosystem so and he had said it's exciting to see the next generation of apps won't have to build user identities and social graphs from scratch users will get a personalized experience in a single tap and developers can depend on an open permissionless protocol for social data so that is one of the bigger reasons that builders are building on top of farcaster is that you can tap into the social graph and as that grows so does your user base depending on what you're building so this is also a great way to bootstrap a new app and have users that are already integrated into your flow if you're using something like sign in with farcaster for example and we've seen this happen with different games and different apps and things like dracula and different other things that are not necessarily focused just on farcaster but they're using it as a way to sort of jump start their user base by having this social graph connected to it anything else that i kinda left out there that you wanna add to that adrienne
i just think what's interesting is the idea of building on top of something else isn't new so there's there have been apis there have been open source software you can pull in you can build on top of even from a blockchain perspective blockchains have been permissionless so you've been able to build let's say on top of someone's finances if you've wanted to what's different about forecasters you're building on top of a social graph you're building on top of user identity so by nature these apps that are being built are inherently social and from a culture perspective
it promotes social behavior and it promotes community and it shuns antisocial behavior because you have you you know as a user you're in control of your social graph i can control who i'm following and then other apps can build on top of it so it really is a i think an exciting future to see of just social is inherently built in to a lot of the apps that are being built on farcaster and just these these two concepts of we're talking about culture today which is kind of how people interact and and and behaviors that are rewarded are inherently social
yep i agree and it's it's been really fun to see the different ways in which apps have integrated the social graph so it can be as simple as sign in with farcaster which allows you to sign in with your farcaster account rather than another type of sign in authorization like sign in with google or sign in with a username and password to a point of like games like speed tracer allowing for a separate leaderboard that's only you know those who are on farcaster who might be playing this game so that you can connect with those people in a different space as well so lots of fun ways to do this and this brings us to the seniors and this is a concept that you've sort of you know dove into and shared at the first far con which was a a early gathering irl of farcaster folks and you shared this presentation about the seniors and whether farcaster was 1 and i found it very interesting and it was one of the first reasons i started chatting with you and wanted to learn more so what is a seniors and how do you think that farcaster is a seniors
the concept of a seniors is it's think of it's 2 words put together so it's seen and it's genius and the idea is it's the form of genius it's a collective form of genius community communal genius if you will that kind of comes out of a scene so it was the term was coined by brian eno about i think like the seventies british rock scene and he kind of noticed it's like why is there this incredible explosion of talent and creativity happening and it's oh it's within a scene i noticed i am you know like that different artists were bouncing were helping each other become more creative and and why was it all in one location why is silicon valley why did so much of software and tech come out of silicon valley it's because it was a scene and early days of farcaster was very much like that it was this small scene of lots of developers building on top of farcaster protocol and within a scene there's a there's a bunch of different characteristics that you'll see within a seniors
and one of them is that ideas move really fast within a scene so it's people are very quick to share ideas and tools so it's not i'm not building over here making an invention and keeping it to myself similar to building in public which we talked about i'm gonna build something and as soon as this works whether it's a new technique a new tool a new culture whatever i'm gonna share it with the scene and everybody else starts using it and take and takes it and kinda builds on it there's this concept of network effects of a success which is people are not people aren't looking for kind of to be the the the sole winner it's like you want the scene to win you tend to be a little more mission driven so when someone else within a scene does something in farcaster and let's say creates a breakthrough app we all feel good about it it it it elevates the entire scene it buoys up the whole scene it makes farcaster bigger more successful and pretty much the whole scene wants to join in that celebration so there's there's some friendly competition amongst different app builders within but it really is it's it's competition used to make us better but it's not cutthroat competition we really do share
it's more of an abundance mindset then it's more of a like yeah it doesn't mean you don't have to if i win you don't have to lose we cannot win which is like it's a good
i love
i love this whole idea and i i've really loved that you brought it forward and connected it with farcaster so what are what are some other things that you see in farcaster that connects with these thoughts
oh yeah so one of the things i think we see a lot in forecaster is called out on this slide at the bottom this local tolerance for novelties so it's the local what they call outside doesn't push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene the renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone what that means is it's okay to make mistakes so people can really push the boundaries i think in other social networks people are scared to say something too controversial because you'll have kind of the the the swarms of thought police come out come come come out against you and tell you why you're wrong people push boundaries a little bit people are willing to take risks and when someone does kinda push too hard and we've seen this happen sometimes someone says something or put something out that maybe isn't received so well it's not they're able to recover from it you know and and they're able to to learn from it and and it doesn't escalate into something that is like not recoverable so it's like we we we allow people to make mistakes and when i say we i do mean just kind of the broader farcaster community the culture does allow for people to to to experiment and really push boundaries and that only i i think that only stays what will only stay and will only scale is if we keep kind of working hard to keep that culture right and and being respectful and giving feedback and building in public and and kind of all the things and really looking to better forecaster i think a lot of the things yeah the reason it can be a senior so much is because we have kind of shared goals that for the most part people are mission driven in terms of advancing farcaster as a protocol advancing crypto and even though we do
you know yeah the new the new version of the internet you know so to speak so yeah i i agree and if if you wanna learn more about seniors in general and how it impacts farcaster or how it connects with farcaster i highly recommend you take a look at this article by adrienne she really dives into the details and i found it super interesting it was you know really helped me think about farcaster differently differently the other thing we've often heard is the sort of phrase fc is the new y c meaning that farcaster is like an incubator or y combinator not exactly obviously it's not exactly the same but it there is this incubator feel and we've seen it at different times where for example when frames launched there was an energy that was palpable not only online but that transferred over to irl and we'll talk a little bit more about that in our next our next module but there was this moment where everybody kinda went oh this is really cool what else can we do to help proliferate this idea and to help people build cool things using this new opportunity of frames on farcaster and there were irl hackathons happening and online hackathons happening and putting people putting some funding behind it as well as support and it happened very quickly and it felt like the whole entire environment was involved or somehow connected whether it was just you're you're testing a frame for somebody else or whether you were hacking on something or whether you were giving a space for people to come together for a hackathon or buying pizza for the people at the hackathon
i would say
all those things yeah
yeah but i would even say forecaster is even better than y combinator as a incubator because it's permissionless so yeah yc you have to apply to and and it's very permissioned and centralized so a scene is not something you ever need an invitation to it is it is not it is not velvet roped it is it is just forecaster as a scene because it's full of people who care about decentralized social and if you wanna get in the scene it's permissionless there's no one there's no one gatekeeper you just contribute so people who come in and start contributing to the scene
naturally start making connections within the scene so if you think of a whole network node and of of an existing scene you come in from the outside you start contributing you're tangential you find someone in that node you make friends with them one of the things we see a lot from a senior's perspective and and and why we call it an incubator is there's been tons of people launching companies products apps all all different things with founders that they met on farcaster for the first time so podcast podcast gm farcaster and farcaster media is something that was created nanesh prav and i did not know each other before farcaster so there are many many such cases of people who have found their founder cofounder on farcaster
including many such cases another podcast another podcast from minnesota it is farcaster founders
this is getting weird so and i think the key is or the i'm sorry not the key but the other thing that people do is when you're within a scene it's permissionless you start contributing but lots of people have just once you start making friends with someone on a public feed people will start maybe you kind of create real relationships you start take it to direct cast and private messages you get on a a g meet or a zoom meeting or a facetime and you start getting to know people which i think we have this on a slide later but another common theme from the forecaster culture is the concept of url to irl which is taking relationships from online first into into real life
and we talk about that a little more in our next in our next module yeah so i think you did a great job of summing up the seniors and where that kinda lies right now and we definitely feel that and then there's also a number of folks who are sort of the influencers of culture within farcaster and not in the traditional or what we commonly know as influencers it's not that same kind of thing but that have somehow impacted and this is a very very very small sample there are multitudes more of folks who have had impact on culture in different ways so you know for anybody don't at me is what i'm saying but we've got obviously our 2 you know the 2 founders dan and barun and then you have sort of the i'm gonna say it coinbase coinbase mafia the folks who used to work with them at coinbase were sort of the early invitees and have had an impact on the culture and that includes jesse pollock who is still acclaimbase but also is the founder of base and that and that l two has been a huge impact and connected well with farcaster jacob from zuora is another one and that has also had a huge impact on farcaster and vice versa with zuora being the first platform where you could mint an nft through a frame directly on farcaster for example rish who we've talked about before who launched nanar which is a platform and a suite of tools really that can help any builder create something on the farcaster rails linda who we're gonna talk about in our next module a little bit more who who was at coinbase and then moved on to create her own fund and then launched bounty caster and that has grown tremendously and we'll talk more about that in our next module and then we have vitalik who obviously you know wasn't necessarily somebody coming from coinbase or friends with dan but came through in a different way because of his dedication to decentralization and anything built on sort of ethereum rails if you will so he has for a while been pretty integrated into farcaster especially early on when it was very small it was you know he he produced a lot of some of the most interesting content that was coming in and still does but there was even a moment in time where people were upset that he was on farcaster more than twitter and wasn't sharing as much on twitter and and even got elon musk's attention with why did he leave and he didn't really leave but he just was spending a lot more time in in the farcaster ecosystem and then we move on to a few other folks who have had impact who didn't necessarily come from that early ecosystem but have had a strong impact of their own on farcaster like ted and nonlinear and cameron so ted who has just been somebody who has had a huge influence on the culture created club ted was very instrumental in bringing together the second farcon and just in general is somebody that you're gonna wanna follow to kinda see what's happening within the space nonlinear who created fabric is one of the cofounders of fabric and hypersub and you'll see a lot of talk about hypersub within farcaster and we'll talk more about what that is in our next module and cameron who has created a number of different projects including recently with kristen okay banger which is a podcast and livestream but before that was along with gren one of the first founders of farcon so the first farcon that was done in boston very small but sort of instrumental piece of the puzzle in forming the culture of farcaster and then below that we have a few of the other brands and impacts of farcaster in the middle was base which we've talked about already and sort of those connections there on the end is purple purple was is a dao that was founded 2 years ago to help support builders on farcaster that is their mission is to help fund and support and amplify those who are building in within the farcaster ecosystem and that was for many folks including gm farcaster the first revenue they may have received or even the first support of any kind as to what they were doing so really instrumental in helping to grow the farcaster ecosystem next to that is us gm farcaster and i feel like we've had a pretty big impact on media and sort of helping others get the bring forward their own idea of what farcaster media might look like farcaster focused media and then on the end you see a little hat and a little m and those 2 are 2 of the cryptocurrencies that are integrated into the farcaster ecosystem that's dgen and moxie which is fairly new dgen which has been around for less than a year but feels like forever but it's been about i think 9 months and we'll talk more about both of those in our next in module 7 and 8 when we talk about cryptocurrencies adrienne anything you wanna add that i may have left out in terms of some of these influencers of culture
yes of course so it just occurred to me we're talking about moxie and degen which are and and we are going to be in later modules talking about different cryptocurrencies a question that comes up a few times is does farcaster have a token does farcaster have a native token when will farcaster issue a native token the answer to all those questions are no no never farcaster does not have a token has no intention to release a token i'd say the native token of farcaster is ethereum is e or ether the currency within warpcast is warps what that has done which is 1 allowed other people to create tokens within the network so dgen and and moxie are both permissionless tokens and there's some other ones as well
they're both erc twenties to be specific so when we talk about warps warps is an in app only currency but it does not have value outside of the of the warp cast but these other tokens are actually erc 20s that are traded on a blockchain
yeah and then yeah so so tying back to the big theme of this module which is culture because there is no intention of releasing a farcaster token i would say it doesn't mean there aren't people here who try to speculate however it's largely not a very speculative community you know it's not it it i'd say it it veers more towards if you're familiar with the chris dixon analogy of the blockchain as a casino versus blockchain as a computer it tends to be more computer founder builder focused people than speculative casino i'm only here for a future airdrop
yeah but we do see some of those folks as well and and you're welcome but just be careful cyor because yeah there's there's always gonna be that piece of it but it is definitely a little different than what you might see in other other environments yeah great yeah great additions
and i'll just say like i'm laughing because as we're going through influencers of culture all we see are pfps yeah that's part of the culture as you when you jump into forecaster and you start it's like you will start to really get to know people by their pfp mhmm and it's it's very easy i think for professor and i to look at these pictures and know exactly who everyone is know exactly what their personalities are and you may not at first but it's really fun over time to to really get to know people the the people behind the pfp
yeah the people behind the pfp are are the best part of farcaster
yeah
but another good part of farcaster is the memes and the crypto culture so memes and not just this particular channel but many many channels in many places including reply guys you'll find memes integrated into the culture a lot of them stemming from internet culture as well as crypto culture so sometimes it's specific to crypto oftentimes it's more internet related and then sort of tweaked for our our needs and purposes and and moment but it's there's also been times where memes have come through farcaster culture and this is where it gets a little confusing for those who are new when they hear us talk about mole or wow wow or toe spacers dear lord or kiwi sometimes if you weren't here in that moment it may not make sense but some of these memes have a life of their own and they continue on past the moment and become integrated into farcaster culture so some of these may even become a reaction so if you've noticed or if you haven't noticed yet when it sometimes the little heart reaction isn't a heart it's something else like a gm or a gn if you start your cast with gm you will turn the little heart into a gm if you start it with wow wow or have wow wow anywhere in there you will turn that little reaction to wow wow and that came directly from a cast and from just a very didn't seem that important at the time moment of of dan kind of pushing back and telling somebody that this was this was a low effort reply and then it became much more than that so there's these things that kind of take off and i think that is the lightness and humor of the culture and so if you see something that doesn't quite make sense but it seems like others are getting it just ask what are you talking about because it may be related to one of these old og memes that are kind of built into the underlying culture
what do you wanna add to that
the thing i will add is because i was talking to someone recently who is new to farcaster and and they were telling me kind of the the hardest part about joining farcaster when you're new is it's not the technology because it's not that different than a twitter feed if you're used to that it was what you're seeing on your feed when you know when you're looking at what people are posting and they said the vocabulary is confusing the terms words people were using like so riffing on what you're saying is like yes there are some kind of farcaster specific things i think the important thing to remember though because if you don't immediately like understand it's easy to be i think walk away and say this place isn't for me so i think the important thing to remember from a culture perspective is farcaster is builder culture it's internet culture right so but it's not exclusionary yep
so if you remember that kind of put your builder head on start contributing don't overthink don't worry about like having to fit in to an exclusive club and and i think kind of the way you cast for probably the 1st 30 days whether you know whether you cast a certain way or not really would probably have an like will set you up for success so don't be alarmed if you come in and you see toast spacers and mole and weird things on your feed in our next module we're gonna go into i think a little more more details and give you a little more advice on how to approach farcaster when you're early on in terms of like how do you how do you fit in with the with the culture
but don't be alarmed yeah don't be alarmed and also don't be afraid to ask especially you can always tag adrian or i in a cast if there's something that you're confused about but also just asking publicly and generally you will usually find a a kindhearted soul who will answer that question for you there's even a afraid to ask channel so go ahead and and ask your question and with that we're gonna end this module here but we're gonna continue talking about culture and give you a few more case studies and examples of what we mean in our next modular module so stay tuned