The Hub ep4 Tuesday November 19, 2024 with guest co-host @nounishprof

g m g m everyone how are you doing now miss professor

nice well i'm happy to have you here great to be able to chat through stuff and like as we were saying preshow there's a lot to to go over a lot going on in in the developer ecosystem so even if if folks are coming back i think hopefully some folks would be able to tune in or listen to the recording and kinda just get our reaction or be able to take in their own reaction to to everything that's going on so i i kinda think without a further ado unless thought was there something that you you wanted to add

nice cool i'm gonna quote yours actually as well i need to yes

awesome sounds great gm for everyone who is already here joining i'll get the the screen share up and i'm sure as always kinda like new links will come up throughout the process or you know through through us talking through the comments but there is one that is kind of i think unavoidable that came up yesterday on the timeline sparked a lot of conversations externally on the platform indirect cast etcetera but i started really with this this cast from david d f and i will just read the whole thing give everyone some time to digest it there are many different angles we can take this in and i don't want to like be too argumentative i guess you know i understand why people bring up their own reasonings or opinions on farcaster and this point of the segment isn't one argument is fully wrong one argument is fully right or bashing a certain person i kinda just wanna like bring it up because there's a pretty big conversation around it

nice cool alright so let's read through it says the farcaster protocol does very little today in the way of solving conflicts or ux problems around multiple competing clients which one might expect is the hard and important thing to solve in a social protocol farcaster is being controlled and governed by the 99% client warpcast repeatedly making choices that limit the ability of alternate clients to build and compete signing with farcaster messaging channels as a builder it's unclear why farcaster is not any different from early twitter which was open at all clients but one overwhelmingly dominant client once twitter became big enough it shifted from attracting to extracting and shut down the api becoming the twitter of today ruled by benevolent dictator is farcaster slash warpcast just running back the twitter playbook why should we users and builders trust warpcast continued benevolence when their short term choices are already showing a willingness to compromise on the protocol part in the name of mono client growth and then it also has this image here with with these two graph charts of the user relationship and the competitive relationship i i think essentially what he's trying to say here is that over time there is more that he thinks is being extracted than attracted or that is more that is competitive than than cooperative and and opened up just larger conversation from a a bunch of different folks in the ecosystem but really just wanted to to leave the description at that at first and now as professor when you hear me read that out does anything really come to mind for you

yeah that's interesting there there are a couple and then i actually put up my own because i i wanted to say something and i took some time to think about it there there there were a couple that stood out so dan quoted these two from rish and woj with again these are just everyone's perspectives obviously rish at at nayanar saying sorry decentralized hubs and launching identities are not the same as twitter apis yes these are some things that aren't on the protocol yet but that's not the same as saying the whole thing is centralized and can be pulled away like twitter and then woj as well saying like warpedcast never did anything malicious all the problems can be attributed to priorities if multiple merkel had an infinite dev hours at disposal i don't see a part of the road map that is killing supercast and then another pretty prominent one i saw was from goksu on the merkel warpcast team was you know whether no matter how these conversations are being kinda like structured or who they're responding to whatever i just thought this was a good list of things merkle has been doing to try and push in the direction of keeping things open and fair pushing location data from work cast to hubs pushing x account verifications from work cast to hubs rewriting hub architecture so it scales and there's a less delay of messages between clients so there isn't like a stale when you post a work cast and it goes to something like supercast new things like app frames that they're working closely with developers for new apis that providers like nadar can use and then you know here at the bottom saying this isn't to say that merkle is is perfect it can and should be better on all fronts of decentralization starting with better docs uptime and global keys so warpcast isn't the sole custody and and and and i posted something kinda similar i said that from my perspective i don't think farfcast two developers have ever been in a in a better position there are full providers again to access data in a multitude of different ways as well as open source resources if you wanna pick and choose different parts of the protocol and you're willing to host that yourself even though there are some of those issues merkle does seem like they're doing it in a very benevolent way and working with other developers the legos are coming together crypto is in an amazing spot where 2025 is poised to be a big year and so i think the overarching conversation is about like how much is kept internal versus how much is decentralized or how much is you know open source from my perspective again again like through through some of these cast i think merkle has done a great job of keeping their priorities open not trying to hold particular data or feature just because it's a moat you know even from the beginning when i joined farcaster in 02/2022 and there were no hubs there was just like this single api that you could use you know people were were having these questions then and early on i learned this kind of like product led development of keeping things more in the product really being able to iterate on it until you get fully decentralized and again do we want a lot of this even more decentralized even more programmable a thousand percent i think we're continually trending in that direction it's in an even better place today than it was six months or a year ago and it's a public ongoing conversation so you know no matter who you are as a builder if you have a particular gripe like i would say that like i don't i don't mean to say that the way david went about it wasn't constructive it opened up conversation

but i think another way to also go about it is maybe being direct about the particular problem that it's facing instead of creating this larger thing and and then i'd also say there are certain areas where

like there's a stated versus revealed preference like for example it would be really cool if like warpcast was open source or if there was an open source module to do every single thing in the farcaster universe sign up a user create a passkey make a feed like any single function imaginable but if all of that was released today i don't think we're just gonna see an influx of things being built all of a sudden so with the decentralization there's this push and pull of learning from the community to make sure that the choices you make like at that moment best align with them even though you know like every single thing isn't gonna happen on day one and and and like that's pretty standard for for software or for product development i feel

yeah for

yeah yeah yeah i mean i think a lot of people have had similar feelings you know i don't think there's always a constant state of there's like a developer utopia i guess you know

you wanna but you wanna keep all sorts of people in you wanna keep like someone like david who has been in the ecosystem for so long and built cool stuff like discove which a lot of people on farcaster might not even have i've seen but was like the first ever alt client on farcaster and then also this side and maybe it's a little bit different but let's see i saw this from ted let me let me see if i can find it it was about kinda like farcaster like backwards compatibility where was it i forget where i'll have to find the cast but essentially ted put up a cast saying something along the lines of there were a bunch of times where she met someone at devcon in thailand and then the person was saying that they had built some frame or something a couple months ago and they were trying to like share it to be like hey look at you know look at this thing that i did and that the part of college moved so fast that the thing was inoperable by that point yeah and

yeah for sure no i mean i certainly don't know the answer i think like i think the internet in general doesn't have a great answer to that the average lifespan of a link is like twenty or thirty days or or whatever and and stuff's kinda just yeah it's crazy like you know things are are all over the place and then we have this huge fragmented internet that like people like google kinda control their own index too but crazy i'm sure yeah i think the difference too is like do we want that to be a future principle and should things like the internet have or should software in general have principles of backwards compatibility like i create a note on the notes app of an iphone in 2,005 and then i can sync it up to icloud and in 02/2024 up update it a % like i agree with that but back to the product led thinking especially with farcaster being like so relatively small if you think in the scale of like large twitter platform then i think it is okay to compromise for development over long term stability when the long term stability isn't yet for something that you have like the conviction on if it can with with with with how old doing being out there long term you know

yeah i mean not not not even in a in a scolding way but i don't even think the majority of people on warpcast would say that channels as a ux are even solved in a centralized manner so

for sure cool alright let's see what's next oh okay speaking of channels i don't know if you've seen this but twitter x i'll just call it x x did something i think is pretty neat they made this thing called a portal and we can just check it out so when you click in here and maybe you've seen that there also it takes like okay nice so maybe you've also seen there are these communities let me see if i can find

got it so yeah with the community this is kinda like i guess for frame of reference this is the community thing it's kind of like kinda looks like a a channel honestly yep you know it has a little about page media top latest but then this portal thing was created for the nfl and it has a similar type of navigation layout except now it has a dynamic schedule page where it has every week of the nfl schedule and you can click in and see the particular games you can go to the standings you can go to stats and it will actually show you the the x profile for a particular user on the

so like very interactive and built in and and this doesn't look like an iframe or anything whatsoever it looks like they use the the you know whatever x design system they have and and custom built out like a new experience fully within x for this

yeah so if you're a user and wanna check it out if you go to explore they're like highlighting it right here on the explore page nfl portal i'm sure if you search it up but as soon as i saw this the first thing that came to mind is this is the exact direction that i would want channel home pages to move into where yeah i'm not opening a mini app but in a client you know maybe warpcast does something like this where in telegram mini apps for example telegram offers a set of ui components for developers so they can use the themed button and text and all of that and you have a very slim like spacing whatever but you're in telegram you're not like on on another platform that kind of like really native interaction i think would be cool for channels the road to getting there is obviously a little bit tougher but i think that even with an idea like this there's enough already there for someone to build out some sort of proof of concept that even if it lives outside of warp cat if your proof of concept gets enough traction or you you do it well enough that might you know catch dan's eye

yeah for sure yeah i think also like as a if you're a builder and you say hey well why would i build this right now if like i'm kinda locked in like if if the end goal is to have it in warpcast why would i build it right now well here's my pitch to you builder no one's done this right now if you yeah really build something in a couple days that is compelling enough you know what if like now just prop you just mentioned that there are the channel links what if the page you build for a community is so compelling that a channel owner puts it as the channel link and then everyone just clicks on the link as like a mini app or whatever instead of actually clicking the channel if that happened for even a couple of communities i think that would really catch wordcast's attention and and make them or other clients think about alright this really shouldn't be a mini app this should be like a fully embedded experience how do we support something like this

yeah for sure awesome well yeah this is definitely a cool area and and then sahil as well i i agree with what he said from from openranc soon this is what channel apps will look like it might be a little better though native transactions moderators can launch manage or curate permissionlessly for sure for sure

another thing or before we go over this one from varun i wanted to show this one from varun developers this is for you on a developer show these are the sort of things i wanna make sure that we highlight all of the opportunities ways for you to really stay in tune with you know how you can participate in grants developer programs etcetera so this is one and highly encouraged because merkle does not do many of these so warpcast is giving out $50,000 in retro grants to apps and developer tools on farcaster you can fill out this link we will put it in the show notes you only have until november 31 and it seems like the criteria is usage duration value and open source and i know because i filled this out there's a section where you can put in links to public metrics so for example we have an on chain app that on chain app has a dune dashboard where you can view the how many people use it showing those metrics are really the value duration value that is something that i think would be really helpful here to to further like why what you're building is furthering the community i think since it seems like they're trying to target center 10 or so projects it's not a purple retroactive situation where a bunch of people are getting it kinda just for creating their so i would again just a great opportunity but if you're applying i would highly encourage that if you have metrics especially if they're public and on chain that i would i would share those but really cool opportunity

yeah yeah awesome and then another one that i thought was pretty helpful was this thread from varun on an update on protocol priorities going into 2025

yeah i think especially going back to how we started this entire conversation today around like making sure that that people are aligned around what's going on in the protocol it's an awesome thing that we have these open debates and conversations around like where are things going

awesome so i'll start going through this we think a lot of interesting things are gonna be built on chain soon farcaster should be the programmable incredibly neutral social network that brings users developers and blockchains together but what does this mean tangibly one frames will help developers bootstrap new ideas i actually think i think a cool thing there's like five or six of these i think a cool way we can go through this is maybe stop for a second after everyone but we'll see maybe some of them don't have as much information so for this one frames will help devs bootstrap new ideas test new ideas by putting them in a frame it's fast to prototype easy to get distribution to a wide crypto friendly audience popular frames can be turned into full fledged apps or even companies over time we're working on a new standard which will make it easier to build interactive experiences have wallet integrations to take on chain actions and make frames more discoverable and reusable

so i actually have some mixed thoughts here i think frames are a really good vehicle they've done a lot we're in this interesting space right now where i feel like there are a ton of high quality frames and app frames or maybe not as much excitement for the feed as there is excitement about the infra for them being built if that makes any sense yeah you know going back to what we were just talking about with channels you know if we think about a fully programmable channel page for example the end goal in my mind is that it's it's what we saw and all of the apis we want are within warpcast and and you're not in a mini app going back down into warpcast i guess what i wonder is how many interactions people are going to wanna do in that mini app and how how beneficial it is for them to be kicked back to actions in warpcast versus saying i'm in the feed i found the app or thing i wanna do i'm going to the next app to do it

yeah totally oh i don't know what just happened to that cast

there we go nice but yes no i i i agree there i think we're still really early into frames i think like the what i was the anecdote about maybe early in in frames is like just because of how much more time there is to build them how much more time there is for the expected to grow and also if you know like if you know that the spec is changing it probably makes more sense to kind of wait and not bank everything on of course yeah yeah for sure

yeah i also wonder what if any role ai plays in it like this is i don't even know if this is in my show notes but one thing that i saw from the other day is anthropic that makes claude they have this thing now where you can just get a dot text file with all of their docs in it and this is really this is really cool because then you can just you can just copy paste it into like an llm to be able to ask questions over it and the reason i bring it up is i wonder if this sort of aiification from the developer experience is gonna happen more in the farcaster world because over the past couple months and over the next couple months ai has gotten so much better it's gonna continue to get even better and that is gonna help out developers immensely like i saw adrian is using i

and i even have a friend zach davidson who's using like ai fully to or partially to create the farcaster marketplace that he's using oh cool really cool tool so i think like there's so many different ways and like so many different types of people across the stack that can that can benefit it and and that will just like help so much with with building all this sort of stuff

yeah for real cool the next one so we just did frame next one is the snapchain the snapchain will make it easier to build apps and infra apps are falling out of sync with each other as the network is getting bigger think we're at a hundred or something gigabytes now or maybe even 200 something if you measure like the the total size of the network problem for infra providers as well as apps snapgene solves this by eliminating errors creating a path to reaching 10 x scale roughly 5,000 transactions per second if done right it will make it much easier to maintain and keep in sync it's like basically our own blockchain essentially i don't think they wanna call it that but i mean and then you can do a lot of really cool stuff as well we can move the hubs on chain here make oh sorry not the hubs we can move signers

snapchain make it a lot easier to like manage to to delegate it's gonna make it a lot easier for different compatibility between clients so like if you create an account through warpcast and wanna go to supercast or create an account through supercast wanna go to warpcast all that sort of stuff by move moving some of that data to snapchain as well as some like wallet upgrades that are coming that's gonna make it all a lot easier you know the sync that we just spoke about but if you are just a developer in general and wanna know what this means for you in layman's terms faster easier building

yeah it's like a much much more durable version of hubs that makes hubs a lot more like a blockchain and has these yeah has these blockchain like mechanisms that make working with data at the scale that farcaster can get to just like a lot more provideable for everyone

so that should be cool and if you wanna follow along let's see they have a v zero implementation right here snapchained v zero fourteen hours ago so if you if you wanna check out looks like they're they're trying to get something done in february but if you wanna just see what they're up to here looks like they're writing this in rust which is pretty fast in performance cool cool so the third one here is smart wallet support for farcaster accounts like kinda related to to what i was saying about like wallet upgrades helping with some of the stuff as well smart wallets with passkeys will make crypto much easier to use we expect that most on chain accounts will use a smart contract standard soon smart caster standards for authenticating and connecting must be updated to work in a world where the app does not have access to the wallet's seed phrase and the wallet and social app may not always be connected to each other design on this will start soon this one in particular is one of the the really helpful ones so where where varun is saying where the app does not have access to the wallet's seed phrase the wallet aren't always connected to each other i think these are some of these examples where you'll have kinda like tiered permission systems or one client trying to do something on another client but it doesn't have the permission because the like original wallet of the first client is the the delegator of that action moving a lot of that to some of these new standards like smart wallets as well as some of some of the new eips that are yet to have been standardized yet but could in in 02/2025 is is gonna make a lot of that simpler

yeah i think that there is a level of user education that needs to happen i think i think what will happen as well is hopefully these upgrades bring us closer to the type of permissioning we want and so that in and of itself like not only should make it a little bit easier to explain but makes it more desirable i would like to think at least

but but but it is still helpful to know like this is what's powering it not just like there's some big box in the sky and just trust it like yeah

yeah cool all right the so the fourth one i think these are the last last two maybe fourth is better standards for developers i got bias towards moving in quickly in search of growth but farcaster needs to be a place where serious developers are willing to dedicate time and energy so they're gonna make sure that they're thorough about changes if you are breaking changes shipping documentation i think on most of those they've been great i think the documentation front is the one where i've always said it could be better in some regards but i think especially over the past couple months they've tried to do a better job of organizing everything and i do think a lot of it is really just about like organizing and keeping it up to date i think if you were to actually create one single index of every single doc and notion page that warpcast has created there's probably like hundreds at this point but it's just like how do you keep all of that organized and and up to date

yeah i mean this could be a cool again maybe this isn't the final factor but i always they do think this is like a cool ai use case like maybe this is a a chat g p t plug in maybe you know

maybe that doesn't solve everything but i think that could be cool and then the fifth and last one which we just went over were the retroactive developer grants warpcast is running this other experiment it seems like every quarter or couple quarters they're they're looking for for like new sort of experiment factors the one thing i would say here is like if you're a developer this is awesome but i wouldn't i wouldn't bank because you see this in the priorities i wouldn't see this and be like wow going into 02/2025 i'm banking my building strategy on how these developer grants are gonna pan out i wouldn't think so especially because of how they're experimenting with it i would think that they're probably smaller and more for rewarding projects retroactively that have a rather sizable impact not like a incentive for you to build more on farcaster if you haven't already if that is something that you wanna do though there are many different daos and communities adjacent to farcaster whether you wanna post weekly in the base builds channel or you wanna do something on rounds..wtf that's that's separate and maybe even something i can kinda like scour for is are there other grant programs that we can we can highlight there was one last week from ai sixteen z that that we went over but yeah yeah but but

yeah

that's a good one

yes yeah a lot lot of farcaster folks here who like work there or have worked there like yeah

nice yeah i think that was the end of the protocol priorities but i think these are pretty helpful oh let's see here this one looks interesting from stefan who works at frames what impact do you think a work cast embedded wallet will have on alternative client adoption and make it a priority to keep an up to date list of notion spec docs that i definitely agree on that

that's like half of it i suspect all on chain apps will move towards embedded wallets the ideal experience is one where a user has a single wallet and grants limited permissions to apps yeah i think like i think oh where did this is another cast there's i keep having these castable moments that we can bring up but dan posted something like this yesterday i will find countless here we go so dan posted the wallet is not where identity will live in crypto it will be higher up the stack an identity will have many wallets there will also be multiple identities both public and then z k so yeah i think this is the sort of world i'm envisioning in terms of like a multi tiered system there you know even in even in your your regular world think about you know web two whatever there are all these different contexts that you live within and then within those contexts there are sub contexts so what smart wallets can we enable is a set of tiered permissioning where we can make something like this where you have some route like at the at the top level there's dylan's deck the person or whatever and then there's dylan on farcaster dylan on twitter dylan on warpcast dylan on supercast whatever and they can all have the same sort of like ground framework on which i can build rules

yes for sure i was just seeing i keep losing my my tab actually but i just saw that dan posted something funny with a non he's like a non con

yeah well it's funny because i

yeah one of the things i think is funny as well is that there was there's some z k podcast i forgot the name of it but varun was on it and i was listening to it maybe like back in april or may and at some point that something came up where varun was saying that they were thinking about zk like earlier in the farcaster but it didn't make sense at the moment and it probably didn't make sense right then but at some moment it probably would make sense and it's funny how now we're seemingly may maybe in that moment

yeah and then i guess speaking of that that is what we had next we are a non if i understand i haven't actually played around with this correctly i do know that kartik made it and the code is open source which is super awesome that he just returns to farcaster and then his like third cast back is by the way is open source and like 300 likes

it's pretty awesome welcome back yeah for for real but adnan is you can use it within a mini app as well which is pretty cool must have 20,000 anand so i'm sure he did make this token i would assume and then you can post through z k proofs and funny enough if you have 3,000,000 you can delete the host of anyone abusing the account i think that's that's pretty funny yeah

yeah

yeah and i guess there's no he's not like there's no token you're not earning any token through this you know mm-mm it would make more sense to have your own token if it's like if you feel like post to pay and he's earning all that or whatever then

yeah it's also yeah it's funny how much more the delete is as well yeah it was like i wonder who's who's gonna i wonder who's gonna make the leaderboard next to track

the wallets that have over 3,000,000 or whatever

there yeah but yes this was a really cool one again if you wanna check it out you should definitely just go to kartik's page sloke on farcaster but i will be

kartik sloke

yes yeah but i believe that brings us to the end of our content there is one thing i wanted to call out is i believe the developer call so the developer call was last week i don't think it is happening next week because next week thursday is thanksgiving in the us so if you're a developer i haven't heard anything there's a slight chance maybe it would happen this thursday so they do it before the holiday if not they'll probably delay it to the thursday after just definitely like keep your ears open for that

say either way just keep your ears open

very cool i definitely will

nice i know so many things to keep up with right now it's a very exciting time to be building on farrakesh

thank you yeah it's crazy we're already already four in definitely i know very long way to go but i think it'll also be cool to see what other trends emerge that i can have like particular deep dives or episodes on like if another frame like moment happens for example i you know those sort of things i certainly wanna be able to like move really quickly on to just respond to what the developers find most helpful or let's say something like that happens like you know what if it happens a day or two before the podcast and then i get on the podcast live and it's like hey here's how you here's what it is and here's how we can start building on it together or whatever like yeah just figuring out what those moments are that are that are gonna be helpful but it's it's already been a lot of fun to just be able to

nice alright well i appreciate you joining me thank you so much everyone for for listening in and we hope that you have a great rest of your tuesday or whatever day wherever you're listening in from

alright bye bye