The Hub ep14 Tuesday Feb 18, 2025 with dylsteck.eth

gm gm everyone and welcome to the fourteenth ever episode which is crazy fourteenth episode of the hub a forecaster focused developer podcast or forecaster developer focused podcast whichever way you would like it my name is dil stick dot eth your host here and i'm excited to be back for our fourteenth episode today is gonna be a mix of me going through some links as well as doing some live hacking on a product that i built in about her day that has been going dare i say semi viral on the timeline i think that's fair to say but i've really enjoyed building it i've been building this v two frame tap which is essentially like a farcaster ai native search but what i'm really trying to think of overall with tap is what are different ways to just help getting people to explore things on chain so one instance of that might be asking the chat to explain stuff about a farcaster user or about what you you know ask it it might what you might wanna do but there's other ways to surface that content and so one thing i had built is essentially a tiktok style feed almost you know dracula esque but of trending video content that's already been casted on farcaster and you also have a little you tab where you can see your cast and i think some people have resonated with that and it's been fun for me to build and so i just wanted to go over it but before we kick off let me repost with the links quickly

gm now is prof gm gm

just posting on some platforms quickly

all good to go alright thank you so much everyone for joining let me just get the first link up and then we will be all good to go sorry for the interruption here at the beginning

alright so the first thing i wanted to go over was last week's dev call unfortunately i was not fully able to be there i've kinda missed the last two which just stinks for me because i had a whole track record of going to them not honestly even for the sake of just saying i've gone to them but actually for being there for the knowledge for for being around those folks so definitely gonna be at the next one next week no doubt about that even though it's east denver or whenever the next one's gonna be but let's just walk through this quickly so again this listed in order of priorities so the good thing is if you wanna just get an overview start with priorities and that tells you obviously what merkle slash boardcast is thinking of and in what order so first on the crypto side they rolled out their wallet you know like a little embedded wallet ui to 1,500 users they're pausing until they fix some bugs and complete some internal reviews they also rolled out token pages and token actions i don't actually know if these token actions are out or if they just propose the ui what what i think they mean by the token action is that the sdk for v two frames can actually call something like a swap or going to a token page which again i'm not sure how that part is out but that is gonna be super sick such an unlock even just going to the token page what they have put out are these token pages which similar to like an interface or rainbow whatever you can see some information about the token holders who are your friends on warpcast that i think is super helpful activity etcetera and and it literally looks like like we're seeing it right here so that is out now for most people and also if you just put in either a ticker or the contract address that will render as a little token embed in the cast and warp cast which will then take you to the token page on the social side so we have rewards program updates so last week this means there were further tweaks to d boost rings fixing bugs with payouts seems like maybe smaller stuff last week and it's important to you know obviously get that dialed in with invites free invites are rolled out so a lot of folks maybe everyone got three more free invites observing that etcetera it seems like that's gonna be easier to do as sign up costs get cheaper more rewards for new users i think now there's a more compelling case as the wallet comes on where you can just not even know anything about crypto start posting on farcaster and earn money without you know without again knowing any of it the warpcast q four grants those are waiting to get paid out for github etcetera if you want a q four grant in 02/2024 on the protocol side primary address verification

looks like there's an fid for you to be able to set what your primary address is like where you wanna get airdrop stuff so working on that fip it looks like that chain there's a private test set in progress nayanar is working on it with warpcast merkle they're finding and fixing some bugs and they expect march for general availability slash potentially when they're gonna kinda merge it into their live system and all this other stuff here it just does not seem like they've been working on as much reducing sign ups no additional progress turning dcs into an open protocol sign in with farcaster fc connect but you know that's kinda that's where we are there

g m t m tutorizer g m to the 30 of you who are here i really appreciate you joining wow 30 on twitter honestly twitter is where there's a lot of distribution there can't really beat the network effects alright let's do this one live let's find some developer news and then afterwards let's do some tapping one thing this isn't fully as developer but i really like how jesse is doing these videos they also fit well on on tab videos just saying but they're great to to just go out there and educate folks i mean i even passed it something the other day that we're in a cycle now where a lot more people are asking me how they can use crypto or how they can start trading and even these sort of use cases where you're going in person and saying hey i'll pay you like in this video jesse saying what if i pay double 4 x whatever for the food if i pay in crypto and you don't normally pay crypto just getting those value props across to someone and then getting them to that moment where they can actually receive the crypto or do the thing on chain is not always as easy as it seems you know getting a lot easier and it's just like that's something we should continue to strive for for wanting to do so i like that sort of content another thing i'm certainly gonna try and be at samuel huber's talk at or workshop at at ethdenver if you don't know samuel huber is probably one of the most legendary developers developer advocates in the forecast ecosystem always helping folks to make sure they can integrate forecaster into their projects etcetera so so be there

another oh for developers what single api do you wish existed in the forecaster ecosystem if you have any thoughts drop them here this from christopher warp cast down now interesting i mean i don't know if we're ever gonna get the actual warp cast data i don't know from the rest here but if you have any thoughts definitely leave them below this i thought was really cool also because i've been kinda thinking about what like the far stack looks like this is work in progress from dan visualizing the farcaster stack this is totally up our angle with this developer focused podcast so let's dive right into it here i won't be in denver yet glad you'll be there to report back yes i'll also prof if you ever wanna come by anyways i'm staying at this based house and samuel huber is gonna be there raffy luciano i i think maybe even like jesse and some folks are gonna stop by so that'll be cool be around a bunch of builders and actually i think next week i might be able to have a bunch of those builders on on the hub to talk through what they're gonna build with the house so that will be very cool excited to run into folks at denver and we'll try and put out as much content as possible while also being sane and getting some rest let's just go through this there really quickly so i guess yes definitely we'll do some mini interviews let's start at the bottom also because i feel like less less is there so you have fids on the op main net you have ens on ethereum l one and you have many native coins which are like tangential but not like that that all doesn't like need to be there i guess fids but i'm not trying to say anything bad about that part i guess what i'm trying to say is that like the on chain component for forecaster is a lot less prevalent i think it's gonna get even less prevalent with snapchain obviously you'll still have tokens on base and other evm networks and all that sort of stuff but i just mean like the actual parts of the protocol itself so then we have the protocol infra apis whatnot so you have snapchain snapchain is the actual data so cast likes follows profiles etcetera and then you have bots whatever you have the f name server and channels metadata

i would maybe even put channels metadata a level up but that's i'll put that in the comments just because i think when i'm thinking of that lower level with snapchane and fname server i'm thinking like what are the what are the low level things to keep the data alive and operating and channel channels metadata doesn't necessarily need to keep it operating if that's already on snapchain i would assume that maybe channels metadata is some sort of indexing that they're doing and that's indexing they're doing for cast and stuff like that but i'm not really trying to nitpick so just think of this this level here as like this is the data this is this is what's kinda keeping the network up on top of it you have infra providers and clients that are ingesting the data doing new stuff on top of it you could have warpcast here as well specialized clients other clients etcetera yeah so you have you know the data and then you have the client's permissionless use and then you have things like frames which live inside of the client and then interact with the the client the client pops it up it goes back to the client to show a cast to get your approval for a transaction and that is kinda how the far stack for lack of a better term works right now

let's see hey and if anything comes up as well that you want me to go over put this in the chat i'm just kinda like going over some top things that i see and then we are gonna do some coding in a second i don't wanna make the beginning all about me

meet people posting more dev content honestly make my life so much easier

let's go through my profile there just all the top stuff i've been making oh okay i guess this is one thing oh this is actually pretty cool

so ceo of vercel guillermo rauschaji has actually been posting on farcaster which is pretty cool i'm sure a lot of you actually host on vercel or use next js a lot of frames especially people have been building on it a lot of stuff i'm pretty sure like warpcast a lot of clients like use next js and stuff like that they're really cool to have guillermo here and he's been posting about if you have feedback so you can you can put that in the comments here in this thread yeah i i i just think that's super cool i put a lot of stuff host a lot on for sale i even use they have this amazing like ai chatbot open source starter which was my open source template for building out the chat for for chat lot of great stuff big fans of what vercel does but this is the more developer focused thing if you wanna be getting that sort of stuff

yeah okay well let's get to some tap stuff now so i can just show you really quickly

so this is tap what it started off as is kinda like a farcaster native chat so let's do an example here let's grab a cast farhaq one and then let's just go analyze cast

this should really be above the text but whatever you get yeah yeah there you go you get the point you know you can put in just like a link to a cast from any client you can put in just a hash you can say something like analyze cast or tell me about this cast or whatever and then it will analyze it you can say tell me more you can do stuff more specifically like ask it about a particular user something i haven't really got to as much but i've been trying to is these different profiles which are kinda like many agents that have tools available from different protocols or apps so for example from icebreaker you can search like get me everyone with the same credential look up users for clanker you can get trending tokens you know in the future launch a token for bounty caster you can search for bounties and in the future create your own bounty so that's kinda what i was going for with that although i haven't touched it as much in the past week or two but then what i built over the past day or so is just randomly the idea came to me that something more dracula esque would be cool if it worked for existing videos and that there just wasn't as much discoverability in general for existing videos and so i thought what if there was a tiktok style feed for it and in in about a night or so kinda kinda hacked this together and so i have the frame up bunch of places but one play one way you can use it pretty simple is if you have the frame added you can just click on the little home thingy there click watch videos or on the sidebar and then it will take you right in here to the feed so the the video we saw from jesse actually a couple of minutes ago is already trending funny enough sorry

sorry she's getting a call but yeah you see the videos here you know tiktok style feed watch them you unmute you can go view the cast and the client so if you're on mobile we just go right to the

something like you know i just found this this video on tap you can send it for our mobile this would open it up full screen it doesn't really work well like in this little frame here on web you can click and see the user's profiles if you're not following them you can follow them and then one fun thing i added last night using now the warpcast wallet is you can tip and eat on main net i gotta mute this tab sorry on main net base or optimism more change in the future you can just click this little tip here on any video you can select an amount you can do a percentage of how much is in your wallet etcetera confirm the recipient and then just tip right there which i think is really cool and then also you can go to this view tab and you can see videos that you have casted out so pretty simple but has been really cool to see people's reception of this so far and definitely want to continue adding you know even more to it so also if there's anything in particular you wanna see i cast it as someone build asking for this a few weeks ago do you mean on the video side or the or the ai side but either way that's really cool to see mikado very cool to see

i guess i will just run through i will run it locally and i'm gonna see if there's a thing or two that i could really quickly tweak or start working on and then if not then we will call it for now and in the meantime if you have any questions or anything that you see in the chat that you that you you know want me to build definitely let me know i'm just gonna get the dev server running in the meantime

and thank you ashprof very cool

mute oh okay it is auto spamming me to connect my wallet you see there's small little things like that that i gotta work on

connections

i'm trying to get it so that if your wallet isn't connected it should auto connect to unload and for some reason it threw like 10 connection attempts at my rainbow wallet so i gotta fix that but also if you see now that i'm connected to a wallet you should be able to see the the money

cool yeah we need to share more clips from gm farcaster in the hub yes totally a % so how this works right now it's very simple let's get the code up

the coding so let's get the code up

alright

just the next js app

farcaster cast videos gonna make like a oas or something for this too

okay so we can walk through this quickly simple get request i have some off middleware i have a cache key we're checking redis my redis instance is kinda slow right now i may may do some extra caching just like on vercel because it's a little too slow people are getting the error and caching the data for six hours and it's still too slow so gotta work on that but pretty simply we have off middleware here just for the route you know we have a cache tag check the cache if we have cached data return it if not we're fetching the data from nanar i've been playing around with a bunch of the different nanar routes it looks like one of the most reliable things i've done so far is called their cast search route and then just query it by stream.warpcast.com which is how warpcast uploads their videos it doesn't sound like it would be the best it's been the best of all the methods i've tried on the nanr routes there's also some other stuff i could do like i could start indexing casts i could start manually liking or listing some cast some cast videos that i think are cool i could filter the data from places like dune so i gotta start getting into that but honestly other than some of the caching stuff which is really my main issue right now i've been pretty pleasantly surprised with the results i've gotten just from this and with the latency for most most users so again cached data if there's cached data just return it if not we're calling this search route you know with the viewer f i d as context and then just for the ui we're sorting them by cast that have the most likes and there's also again so much more i can explore there do we sort by cast with the most likes but by day is there some extra stuff where i send signals every time you view a video so that your feed is a little bit more personalized to you kinda like a webcast we're gonna have some sort of ml thing here i'm not gonna go super crazy but you wanna figure out something that's gonna be impactful for users

but that is how we're gathering the data and then for anyone who's interested i can show you how the ui works as well components custom

for caster kit which i am bringing back soon and then we go to cast videos index

so this is cast videos this is the parent component it is just like taking in the session for certain things like if you're logged in and the selected tab is you there's like a u tab then we should be changing the api route so that we're getting data for you and the api route is basically the same i just showed you just takes in an extra prop of the fid and that is added to the name our query we're using swr sale with revalidation or stale ball revalidated to get the data just here as a hook pretty simple we have a bunch of stuff to filter the casts and what you see here is a bunch of memoization and virtualization just to make the videos like the row scrolling a lot faster and then we have some stuff like handling expand like when you hit expand in the dropdown we have a callback that is looking for the element by the query selector and it's requesting full screen using native like javascript apis and if it's loading we're just showing a skeleton that's the same size kinda like you would see on tiktok like a a loading screen so we have trending and for you here are the tabs and then we have our virtualizer with the video player and the video player is making sure that we are only showing and selecting the current video that the user is on and we're using a great video package h l s dot j s to make sure that we can support both m p four as well as m three u eight stream which is what wordcast uses for their uploads so that is a bit of a technical deep dive there the main thing i'm kinda working on today is the caching and i also need to add some analytics like if people start using the tipping then i wanna know how much has been tipped on tap but that is kind of the main overview for now everyone you know continue to give you guys updates let me know if anything comes up anything that you want me to cover here on the hub anything that you want me to add into tap if you post good videos i'd like to think they should show up if you post a good video and you don't see it on tap reach out to me and if you post good videos on barcaster i want your videos to be featured that's kinda why part of you know why i'm doing this so without further ado thank you again so much everyone for joining in i promise that next week we'll have even more guests and continue to add more to the show but it means a lot that all 62 60 one of you are here going through this news and these updates it's super fun to go through and have a super rest of your tuesday take care