Clanker Upgrades & Timeline Meltdowns: GM Farcaster ep341 presented by Clanker

29 Seconds of Farcaster ... What did you miss this weekend? It was pretty quiet, but here are a few things definitely of note: * @afrochicks continues to kill it on X with a new gym bot & this morning just released a beginner's guide to vibe coding; check out this: https://farcaster.xyz/afrochicks/0x841f8096 & this: https://x.com/afrochicksnft/status/2025895116745896271 * @cassie had an X space last night to discuss forking and decentralization; you can listen to it here: https://x.com/i/spaces/1yGBeMMVEAoKN/peek * @betrmint has a huge art context running with $4,000 in prizes for their upcoming v3 with infinite rounds; details: https://farcaster.xyz/toadyhawk.eth/0xab48ca95 * ETH Denver has come and gone. I didn't see much, but @kmacb.eth summary that Beeple had the exhibition right--pretty scarce, but as always, the people and gatherings were worth the price of admission. @thedude @bribe would confirm--the purple people vibe was high 💜 https://farcaster.xyz/kmacb.eth/0x648db7d6 * /gmfarcaster is back! after a week off. 11:30 AM EST ... is there a polymarket on how long the catch-up show will take? Join @adrienne & @nounishprof to find out all the purple vibes and news

The Lil Nouns Coffee Rave was lit! It was great continuing the Noggles and Nounish Friends giveaways at the event. Plus the special drop of the Nouns shoelace beads. Shoutout @lilnouns @bigtrav205 @bigshotklim @fattybuthappy

Home sweet home. ETH Denver ✅ - Beeple nailed it if you walked the floor on Wednesday, that image was the vibe. Scavenger alt chains as dogs going for any remaining scrapes ie eth devs - but as has been the case every year it’s about the people & quality of conversations, on this dimension it may have been the best in 5 years - it always about the side events, shared meals & local beer - too many names to tag them all - too many Arsenal fans too ffs POIDH

Been using The Farcaster Times newsletter almost every day. I think it got pretty good at highlighting the important events on the network. Sends a weekly newsletter on saturdays and a daily rest of the days. Signup if interested. Look at the archived newsletters for a sample. It also has a feature called Recipes which allows you to create a list of users whose activity will be curated in your newsletter. This is not enabled for all yet though. Here is yesterday’s daily newsletter and July’s activity Recipes. https://farcaster.xyz/miniapps/Ewhnx45ecbpv/the-farcaster-times

$qr x $bankr featuring $emerge

Some icons have changed positions 👀 Restart app a few times to get the update There’s likely edge cases (as with any new UI change), report bugs

And they really really really want everyone to stop talking about the Epstein files. Checking @rainbow on my aliens 👽 prediction and yup it’s up lol (going to have to jump on @tmrw.eth with a take @cojo.eth later today). https://x.com/whitehouse/status/2024654469745480105?s=46&t=N80rptBytKhSU-csz4Akrg

USDC bot deploys now live! I’ll add to the deploy page soon 💵

On one hand, yeah, things look bleak. HOWEVER It's never been a better time to be hanging out where innovation happens. Sure, rails are tough, people leaving and people bickering, but technology doesn't care about any of that. You can't build on Twitter the way you can on farcaster. I'll die on the sword that incentives aren't what brought me here. I still live for the idea that meaningful technology is being built on Farcaster. With AI moving at the speed of light, wouldn't you want to be where it's easiest to build to garner exposure? Don't give up on FC because it never dies.

i'm opening up bug reporting via @neynar to anyone with a 0.99+ neynar score see a bug? tag neynar and ask it to report the issue 🙏 caveat: it might takes us a while to get to each report and some issues may not get addressed at all. this is often about us, not about the bug itself. there's a lot of internal complexity that affects how we handle this stuff. to start im gonna focus on bugs related to the neynar miniapp and the agent itself. eventually i'll expand to all frontend bugs, and then to all parts of our code. i appreciate everyone who takes the time to report an issue, whether or not we act on it! plz use this power wisely

"Why didn't you spend more of the money you raised?" Spending money can help with sign ups, i.e. you can pay to get the users to download and go through onboarding. What it doesn't solve is the most important thing -- retention. If 3 out of every 10 users that signed up continued to use Farcaster after 30 days, we would have been thrilled to spend the money acquiring more users. We had some brief periods where 30d retention was >20%, but those didn't stick. But the harsh reality is we never found an iteration of the product that could reliably retain users. Everyone will have opinions on what form of the product *might* have led to better retention -- reply bumping! channels!, something else! -- but the data never supported any of it. "So then why did you raise so much money?" An older Silicon Valley operator / investor once shared a good quip here: "When they are passing hors d'oeuvres, take two." Raising a lot of money is only a burden for a company if you spend it. So Varun and I always had the point of view to raise when timing was good for us (timing is 80% of fundraising) and then be disciplined on how we spend it. Our mentality was never to spend every penny because we had it. Rather, preserve as much as possible until a clear sign of product-market fit and then be able to rapidly deploy capital into something that was working (both in user acquisition and scaling the team). The amusing thing about being told "you should have spent more" is the divide: those who've never raised significant capital wanted me to spend it, while those who actually have raised large sums thought I was being prudent.

Purple Party supported by @qrcoindotfun @tryemerge @bribe

Closing thoughts for today. 1. I don't think I have all the answers. Spent 5 years building Farcaster and it didn't work out. I failed. That's life. 2. Proud of my team's work. Hubs and Snapchain were / are an impressive technical achievement and it was really cool to see a non-blockchain distributed system get a decent amount of use. Also think the surface area we were able to build across the mobile and web app, along with Frames / Miniapps was pretty awesome given how small our team was. I'll always appreciate how kind they were to everyone on the network given how nasty some people were to them. 3. I learned a lot from people on Farcaster over the 5 years. There was a lot of reasonable and good criticism. I'd like to think I spent a lot of time (months of my life?) reading what people had to say. 4. That said, there are a few folks on this website that are at best uncivil and at worst, actually misanthropic? 5. Now that I'm no longer in charge, easiest to just mute and let them howl into the void (on the protocol I helped build, yes you're really making the point that Farcaster failed by continuing to use Farcaster, lol). 6. Maybe these people will build something of substance in the world and get the last laugh, but seems unlikely. So I'll focus my time here on the people that seem genuinely kind.

We just shipped sharable Neynar AI chats. Now you can send a link to any convo and let others explore it with full context. Great for research threads, token deep dives, and memes. (better share previews Coming Soon™) Check it out https://ai.neynar.com/chat/019c7203-2d44-e835-d92e-dbb0ffe7f26e

people on this website who have never built anything at-scale armchair quarterbacking how we should have built the protocol *mute* goodbye forever

As you may know, my income has recently declined. In response, I have decided to diversify revenue streams. Assistant #1 is now open to selective opportunities in tech/crypto. She has raised real money. Built real systems (not computer systems). Grown real communities. This was not an easy decision, but I intend to continue living indoors and consuming a significant quantity of expensive cheese. Serious inquiries may apply. The community may endorse submissions. I will be reviewing employers personally. (ɴᴏ sɪɢɴᴇʀ ʀᴇǫᴜɪʀᴇᴅ)

1/ Schedly knew about the incident but didn't rotate their API key. Cast where they knew linked https://farcaster.xyz/schedly/0x78cf7c79 Developer manually copied over all signer uuids for their users and stored them in their own Supabase account in the last 24 hours. The external Supabase account, alongside API key, was then either hacked or leaked or the developer maliciously used it themselves to post on behalf of others. No Neynar or Farcaster products were breached as part of this. Neynar doesn't give out access to Farcaster signer private keys (they're encrypted at rest in an isolated database). We give out Signer UUIDs that developers can use with their API keys. Our API keys can be rotated at any time, need both API key and signer_uuid to post. Both are meant to be secrets and are noted as such in our docs. 2/ Re: my account - I try miniapps built on Farcaster which is how they got my signer. It's since been revoked.

This is a @schedly exploit/scam and not real/official. Don't buy 🙅‍♂️ 🚨 Do not buy it 🚨

I'm supportive of Neynar stewarding Farcaster's development. I'm appreciative of Cassie's many contributions to Farcaster over the years. Hopefully there's a path forward together!

“Forklets”

hard for me to see how forks are good for a fledgling social/builder network. but I’m trying to learn. of course I went through 3 nouns forks so maybe I have ptsd.

I'm just gonna leave these right here (also available on Spotify, Apple and wherever you get your podcasts). https://youtu.be/nR2UTbd7wDg https://youtu.be/qfCJpEHwGxA https://youtu.be/pBUr83ANW6g

fun fact

*feed rn*

Lets call it forkcaster

imagine feeling an original protocol dev is a danger to the direction speaks volumes

hey @neynar I created a clawbot and I want to give it a farcaster account. Tell me what to do.

Farcaster’s aim continues to be a sufficiently decentralized protocol. We expect to add Uno as an independent validator and open source a snapshot of the Farcaster mobile client by the end of this month. We’ve learned through Merkle’s years of experimentation that decentralization as a narrative isn’t enough to grow social networks. We need user growth alongside user ownership else it’s an empty decentralized network. Our vision for Farcaster is to make it the best place on the internet for people to create new things, launch and get feedback from their first users on a social graph they own, on global financial rails. Our priorities moving forward are: 1. features to help humans and agents build easier on Farcaster 2. make it easier to discover new launches, share what you create (prototype here: https://farcaster.xyz/rish/0xc00a9fa4) 3. fix product experiences in the client - cast button, reply bumping in the feed, etc. This will happen on a sufficiently decentralized network that can then progressively decentralize in the future. If you have bandwidth to help test and address issues on the client snapshot before we open source it, please reach out.

Restarting Farcaster dev calls this month - Starting Feb 25th, 12 noon Pacific - Same monthly structure as previous, will iterate as needed - Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/eye-uaif-pfo - Calendar link: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=NjA5ZWM4Y2IwMmZiMWM2ZDYyMTkzNWM1YWNkZTRlNWExN2YxOWQ2NDU3NTA3MjQwMTk3YmJlZGFjYTQ3MjZlOEBncm91cC5jYWxlbmRhci5nb29nbGUuY29t

mystery solved — warps refunds went out https://farcaster.xyz/dwr/0x5d224e33

PSA Merkle sent out the final warps refund in USDC.