State of Farcaster - woj

nice good to see everyone uh so we will talk about the state of forecaster um this is essentially a part two of the presentation and gave at e4o meet up back in February anybody was there at the audience no overlap okay um we had this talk where like at the beginning I asked it was a talk called like intro to foraster like you know started building on forecaster um it was before forecaster was popular so it's going to be a fragment of that in this presentation um and the essentially like I asked this question like you know who knows about farcaster show of hands like who used farcaster and it was like absolutely no one so it's good that you know at least now we have some awareness after what happened over the past six months um and this talk is mostly here because a lot of people also here like you know from my polish friends believe that farcaster is dead and didn't work out as is what supposed to uh so this this would be like really honest review of like what's happening what happened over the past six months uh what's going to happen next uh the goal of this presentation is to give everyone you know as much Alpha about what's happening forecaster was going to happen foraster um we have an amazing guest in the audience yek uh one of the most important Founders in the farcaster ecosystem uh so we're in a really good company uh there's a lot of conference talks that don't have that much insight about forecaster so uh we can start um maybe we can start with um like yeah let's do the the show of hands again like to to judge the audience so like who've heard about the far about farcaster in the past of hands most of the audience then who even has a forecaster account okay still the same people who opened the app last week warcast or supercast or any other client that's still great uh so you all know what I be talking about and like who posted last week like you know the most power users okay still okay that's great uh we need to follow each other um so most of you know uh what happened over past year um a lot of you on boarded definitely in February uh back when frames launched and uh the D launched or like the D started like acre a lot of um a lot of value so essentially around this time is you know where I started getting interested in forecaster and there was like you know six month period of not much happening and this was the moment probably a very important moment in the the forecaster history where like yat launched the D token and two months later were the thing everything picked up um um I think the the warcast team released frame specification a lot of developers came to forecaster to build frames and all of this new experiences and uh es essentially a lot of people came to the platform on board it and started using forecaster um and people came with huge expectations uh some people left like here uh but people came with with future expectations um some people came from you know The Narrative of decentralized Twitter I'm like hey this is something useful built on crypto rails and uh a lot of people came for you know just new time kind of tokens new kind of nfts new kind of economy um so this was this was exciting time and um oh yeah essentially this is what was happening so D started we had this amazing runup and things stabilized as with every most of the market things stabil stabilized right now but these charts are like quite similar at least in the momentum um um fortunately the user stuck more than like the dent token price but um um but you know the the the hype cycle is similar uh excuse me yeah devs are constantly doing a lot of things and like you know now now I'm also like building DJ integration so I can I can promise you we work as hard as as possible um so frames happened uh most of you know what frames are like everybody here is on foraster there is not like an intro level to farcaster unfortunately I was I was hoping to get some septics that that I know that I claim that foraster is dead on Twitter um on this uh in this audience but we don't have these people today so yeah frames happened we had frames farcon happened it was great uh channels happened probably not as exciting as um as tokens and essentially where we are in forecaster right now is in this moment when um a lot of enthusiasm stopped I think people were really hyped till May till till June about foraster like moving everything in this like crypto decensored social media uh and now things definitely cooled off and um and there's a lot of skepticism like you know can this even work do we need another social media do we need another social graph um where is farcaster going will this ever pick up and will this ever work so this presentation is essentially you know a short overview of uh what I think is still you know exciting uh and um and yeah what's happening here so essentially who still has fun on foraster question to the audience okay so this is still like very drunk audience because you everyone's stuck around hello hello uh and um um and you know the yo yo yo um so people who just came we're talking about the state of forecaster we just had an overview of what happened over the past six months and you know uh where we are right now which is like you know quite of a more of a bearish less optimistic moment for for the whole network and unfortunately most of the people in the audience like still have fun on forcaster which is a problem because like you know I wanted to talk about like the the Bish case talk to some talk to some septics anyway uh the activity numbers um fell down and you know there's a lot of problems like you know with bot activity with Spam um you know we we're wondering what does this crypto social network even good for will people will will it grow to actually you know the the 10 tens of millions of daily active users will it's stay very small as it was you know so far um and it honestly you know the summer wasn't looking that good like it was quite pessimistic and a lot of people were really disillusioned of like where where this things going to go and I think a lot of people realized that this like decentralized Twitter thesis is kind of dead it's like we don't really need another text based social media with like another social graph uh I think yakob was like one person that is like laughing now because like he was talking about it all the time um but everyone who came to foraster for decentralized Twitter over the past six months kind of churned and is now complaining that you know forecaster is like you know it's not interesting enough for them all the actions happening on Twitter all the you know people are still on Twitter and um and it didn't really work out how people expected so um you know these are the arguments I think yeah one of the problem is that crypto is no longer like you know the cipher Punk movement where we look for decentralized alternatives to regular systems a lot of people in crypto these days are just like P to make it which is not a problem um but if you're here to make money you're probably better off on Twitter where like there's more people that you can sell to um or you can Market your your assets to um another problem with like decentralized social decentralized Twitter alternative for foraster is the fact that like the truly decentralized social media is like another pleasant experience on the internet and whoever spend some time on foran or like some actual you know free places on the internet you you you suddenly get exposed to a lot of violence and a lot of like crime very fast and um the core team behind farcaster is like definitely not people who uh who want to engage with such Behavior Behavior Dan very often reminds everyone that they're like us regulated company they they plan to take on meta Instagram and all the you know traditional social media companies so so they will not allow crime on their platform so uh a lot of people were kind of disappointed by this because people came to honestly people came to foraster for this like you know uncensorable social media experience uh that is you know web native um everything is allowed you cannot get censored your content cannot get taken down and surprise surprise um while the protocol is decentralized and you can't get banned from the protocol you can get hidden on Word cast like you know on supercast I would also not hold you hold any content that is illegal because it it deems me responsible for uh for for example storing you know illegal video content so the communication layer behind like underneath forecaster is very much decentralized but it doesn't mean that um you know you can do the same things that you can that you would do on some you know hidden servers on the internet where like you know few people come to like discuss n propaganda uh this is not going to happen on on farcaster so the centralized Twitter CES kind of dead because forecaster people don't come to forecaster for for decentralized Twitter after all um and that's a great question what people come to forecaster for these days and I would have to answer this but uh the presentation stopped working oh we got it uh so yeah what people come to foraster for um essentially that's the the big question uh what's next for for forecaster uh we we did previously the show of hands like who still here and like still too many people use forecaster for this to make sense because like you are like hardcore Believers already um which is problematic uh but essentially um we need to somehow get more people for for this to survive uh for you know to sustain development of forecaster and warcast and to actually have a social network that matter is in the world we we still need to grow 100 times from here uh we need millions of daily active users not like you know 50k or something of whatever we have here and probably probably all the uh blue sticks here are Bots um you can kind of make a educated guess of like what is an honest activity and what is a b bot activity because orange sticks orange bars are reactions like unique unique people reacting and blue bars are unique people um posting or like replying to others and usually B Bots just like reply to and like spam the network so probably only like you know this part is like actual real users and and the rest of it is is is B Behavior anyway um anyway what's happening next we need more people we need to somehow attract like you know 10 10 million users uh daily active users so probably like 100 million like 1 billion you know years from now um and this decentralized Twitter uh thesis is not really working out for for farcast right now um I guess if we can do some like audience question right now like does anyone want to share like something very exciting that they come to foraster for every day if anyone is like enough and just want to scream like something they really like about the platform and we can maybe go from there any takers no oh I'm us looking for some thanks so I'm usually looking at like newest frames what is happening right now what are people building I think currently there are not a lot of interesting frames at least for me it's my personal opinion but I'm always looking like what people are building what they are what they are using frames for because yeah frames is an awesome feature in my opinion any favorite frames that like you know make you stick around I mean the favorite one is the one we made for me uh so we built poly market frame where you can bet uh on markets you know straight from uh straight from farcaster frame um and yeah it's it's my favorite one of course but uh we are also using signatures um and I don't think there's a lot of usage of signatures right now in farcaster frame um no other favorite frame to be honest congrats on this one it was super impressive and yeah actually there's not much usage there's not much usage of Solana integration either um but maybe this this will come back they they both are like available right now um somebody run an inquest on parter like what's how do we get grow from there one thing that I contributed is that we need to get some like kol's like vitalik for example he took a break from Twitter and and was on faras so that's what I for example came to faras to read him right and uh I think the organization is small enough that um they should invest in somehow like Target get one or two people really you know famous to convert them to farcaster and people will just follow right I mean I I I said that just take takes one the Taylor Swift to change people's lives right so so I'm not I'm just one yeah exactly right getting people of that caliber uh like vitalic like somebody else I don't know right but um that would certainly uh on board more people right whether it's going to sustain it's a different story right but at least trying to and and I think that's it's just like institutional targeting marketing go after one person spend money on them bring them over uh to hang out for for I don't know a couple of months three months maybe longer they will like it and and that I think that's the way to go one of the one of the directions at least yeah so vital case is very interesting right because actually I think one of I was also very excited about farcaster vital start when vital started posting their more um and I think what happened is like mostly people got angry for vitalic for like you know abandoning Twitter and like potentially causing the E price to tank I think I think uh we had a lot of this narrative over over past month but yeah like idea is how it it should work we we all like you know potentially could move to this like other place of the inter place of the internet um but I think something that that reality showed over past months is that it can only get you so far if you have this like you know great thinkers or posters on on on a social network and doesn't really move the nle when it comes to like a user engagement and um uh and retention uh so you need to have something more than like you know looking up to few popular people who like post to different platforms at the same time and like you know forecaster being one of them um and this I I would love this to be like the secret Source but I think so far it hasn't proven to be one uh but yeah that's you know hopefully this would be like one of the strategies to grow um uh anybody else has like you know their favorite feature of forcaster we can do one of one more of these and we will uh we will follow the present presentation yes we we found the taker now maybe just a comment to that or to expand like farcaster is already doing this that uh people who are key opinion leaders on on Twitter are also post also posting on on foraster like uh the the founder of a6z right uh some people and to me it's kind of like mixed you know feelings towards that because I don't know if this people actually check farcaster you know they post on Twitter they're they have an account on farcaster but I don't know if they look at replies right so if you reply to them like usually would expect them to to reply you back right to to got some feedback and experience so so this cross posting probably many of you noticed recently uh because the audience is apparently very farter native um there is a lot of big Twitter accounts that are posting right now to to foraster uh and it's actually in many cases um an organized action from from the warcast team to have a really good cross posting experience for them so they can so the same thing that you know um Mark Andre uh mer guart see all of these like big Twitter accounts what they post on Twitter automatically gets posted on forecaster and actually the reasoning behind it is not that much for you as the user experience it's to attract them to come back to the platform so they don't come back to the platform which is the problem to solve but if you check the app and you already have some replies and some like engagement there you're more likely to be uh to stick around and I think that's the um that's the goal with with with crossposting it's not much for like your content but it's like to somehow like attract these people back uh rather than have them posting on Twitter exclusively and like when they come to warcast they don't see any notification at all uh and they feel you know they lack their dopamine that they get on Twitter um so yeah anyway um so the social graph Theory you know is great like the social graph is really valuable but it doesn't grow on its own I think we we man managed to disprove this thesis over the past six months we we got the the growth moments we we got the fly whe going but it didn't really last um and we can now wonder like what what's actually cool on farcaster and like how we double down on this so actually you know frames are really interesting and something that um has been released in warcast recently I don't know how many of you had a chance to play with this are composer actions so this is I need to show this on warcast it's not on supercast yet which pains me a lot uh but you know one can do only only as much at the same time so composer actions are something that I'm really excited about they allow you to install essentially an app inside warcast and whenever like you want to post something you can attach you know some sort of a Content generated in the app so uh on the left side the menu is like essentially you start casting you press a button and then you can open one of these apps that is like you know at the very top of um of of the suggestions and you can create an event like you know you can create a Facebook event from straight from the composer action you can literally post a job or like on on Marketplace through Bounty Caster uh you can create reviews like on good reads but like inside warcast or supercast soon um or you can play flappy flappy bird and all of these like developers Lego are actually like allowing us to start creating more closed loop um games or experiences inside the feed where like you know I can start doing something from my cast menu and then everyone else can interact with frames probably something that you experienced like with frames is that you know to with frames with poly Market um is that people who want to use it but they don't see at any given point the feed like you know they need to go to poly Market anyway and this you know changes the behavior of the user where you know they can just like summon this this pole from summon this Frame from from the com cast compos menu and they can use it at any time and they can also like have their have their friends play with this so we can think of it this could be a place where you can like launch an nft tment or you know you start some game that people interact with and this is only like one month one month old already cool stuff has uh has been built with composer actions and I think this would be like a really exciting new opportunity uh for foraster to grow because suddenly you don't have only text content but now you have all of this like application and like you know new type of experience content on the network that you know fortunate hopefully people will come to like you know more more people will be retained um at least that's that's my thesis so something uh else that is very exciting uh on on farcaster right now and I can start like showing supercast screenshots um is is farcaster and something that I think so it started like you know with this points drop but like I think it's it actually started with with the D launch um is forecaster tokens and there's like a lot of tokens that are considered forecaster native these days and they all have like you know some special utility this is interesting so with djen you have tipping you have your tipping allowance based on how much D you locked in the past it was based on the engagement that you're getting uh and you can reward you know content of others and yat created a front end for D on like dig. tips but now there is a front end for D token inside super as well so you can use essentially you know the you can interact with this part of forecaster economy like within one app which makes for a better experience you can kind of like make money on this app without like having like with d you had to had D before but you can get tip D without having anything before and you can just like you earn money by by being on the feed and this is not a built-in thing into the protocol like in warcast this is something that developers outside developers built and this also gives me a lot of hope uh and similar strategy similar situation is with Moxy I think Moxy iterated a lot on the design of D gen um they don't have tipping but you get you get this token if other replies to reply to you there is ham which is actually like uh an iteration over both D and Moxy and um develop ofam is also like a really skilled uh engineer and a great guy uh and they have a great community so these three projects and definitely more than this are essentially causing the experience on foraster where you if you are active enough you you you you get paid money um which again is it wasn't really like goal of this social network to to be like that I think there was a lot of you know crypto related projects that launched with this like earning aspect in mind and they usually get exploited uh very fast or like they get played really fast and if you have this type of permissionless innovation uh this is much harder to to just kill because there's no one project that is like getting exploited you know if if someone is and it happened many times already if someone is like exploiting Deen rules uh with some you know engagement rings or or something like that um you know it's it's up to the Dent Team to to decide what we doing with this you know maybe it will cause problems with d gen but it will not cause problems with overall foraster ecosystem or at least will not kill it uh just you know uh a part of it um so these are like the the economy tokens as I call them and I think the the last part is just regular tokens as I mentioned there's just like so many different things launched on farcaster there's a whole like you know coin market cap type of page called uh forecaster doin forecaster index um just like foraster and so the social graphs allow you for such an interesting way of like Distributing these tokens and spinning out communities around channels around people around topics that I just like you know don't believe this trend will stop and definitely it will pick up like once you know people finish the the summer they they go back to the jobs they uh they come back home they try to make some money again and this will this will just like naturally pick up again soon um so definitely you know there will be more of that there will be more of social is the screenshot from an app called scoop that creates a a trading card of you um and people can like you know buy and sell it and you can buy other cards and you can have fun with this there's again this is foraster native audience so you know but there's like a 10 different social F and forecaster like every everyone on this like in in in uh in this room has like you know 10 different profiles on this app and they're all tradeable they all have like you know couple thousand dollars market caps and uh um the future of this is probably that there will be even more of these projects um TBD was going to break out and like what's what would be actually sustainable but definitely there there will be more of this and something that you know is is definitely uh more of a plug but you know I definitely felt a little bit burned out in the summer um I didn't know where foraster will be going and I decided like I I I did this like very or very first principal research like what's actually interesting in farcaster what what's actually new um I started working on supercast in in October last year with a vision that I can build like essentially a Twitter client that will be my Twitter client I will build it exactly as I want and this is why it will be interesting um I think this didn't play out exactly as I wanted um but now I found like a really new cool product to build and supercast is turning into wallet for forecaster economy um so hopefully after some time it will not be like just a paidon app but it would be like a full wallet where you can you know easily on board on forecaster you can create an account and you can essentially make money from from tips you can you have tutorials how to inter engage with other people and like Ern djen Moxy ham whatever is going be next um and you will be able to do it without jumping through the apps uh without connecting wallets without all of this painful experience just like having you know everything in one app uh and I believe this will be going a fantastic experience uh it's going to happen like you know within next two months maybe three uh depends how how better AI will get and like how how much I can produce this um so yeah supercast wallet is coming um I'm quite excited for farcaster economy and I think this is what's going next for for foraster after this six months I think we're right on time I don't know can we do some questions uh yeah Okay cool so let's do beautiful I have my question more related to like development part uh was it challenging to build support for frames on the client side yes any like tips uh you know anything you can tell so the question was was it challenging and the answer is yes why was it challenging so specifically for my situation you know I was building frames inter uh frames Integrations since they very day Zero and back in the days the specification would change like every week every second week and at some point I just like stopped you know following up all the updates um just because there was too much of it and the you know the code for rendering a frame like was too too bad to too spagety like um now supercast is like up to date with the spec and it interprets interprets most of the frames really well but then still everyone tests the frames usually just on warcast um and the SP the frame spec specification is quite ambiguous around the corners um stuff that you know warcast interprets interprets in one way can be interpreted in the other way on like other clients so even right now there's like let's say 20% of frames that work on warcast they don't maybe follow the full specification but they work on warcast and the developer never check them anywhere else so it doesn't really work on supercast I think overall it's like easier these days to to build frames into your app because you can probably just like for frog or frames JS and like use their renderer this is not what I did for supercast so far but uh I will probably go this route the moment I add transaction frames and mints to the frames um and this could be easier but so far it was really challenging hi um so I met a lot of people in the last few days and I always mention foraster or robcast to them and one of the comment that was quite common was yeah but I have to pay for it and you as a supercast is also a payable app right you have to pay to use it what is your response or reply to people who say why do I have to pay um that's a great question so there's payment on two levels so um first you need to pay to sign up on farter there is a signup fee it's a it's a regular gas fee the reason for it is very simple um farcaster is a is a fully decentralized Social Network all the data is hold is held in a global state of computers that contribute to the network and there is not no infinite amount of storage um so right now every Hub stores like like you know 100 gab of of data so it's like actually totally fine but next time the network scal 10 x it's like you know one terabyte then there's like 10 terabytes and there's like goes into into hundreds like petabytes of data and uh it's just expensive to run these hubs and if the reality is if the network was free you know unfortunately the ab users would just like make everything unusable and it would be already huge and it would be already unrunnable for anyone that's that's that's for foraster fortunately the signup fee is not that much anymore so it started with $14 to sign up that through warcast would be $20 because they they follow Apple Store rules so they add they add Apple um Apple Store tax um and these days it's only $2 on the protocol so we went like from 14 to $2 like and um we review it like you know every six weeks on the developer call um and consensus is to always like lower this and like make it lower lower lower probably you know I don't promise anything but it will go to like $1 for for a sign up um it will always have to be be gated with some some some dollar amount but hopefully less and less and then supercast supercast for now is like a fully you know paid paid only app uh it's it's paid only because I decided to do it without any Venture investors so you know this allows me to to like pay for servers pay for any expenses and um and actually work on it fulltime so people don't like it but I know that that's the only way to actually build it uh and I I I love super gas so uh you know if you don't have any other choice you just you just play with it and actually people who find it valuable are very happy to pay hello um so if someone's an aspiring builder in Social uh do you think uh forecaster is creating a a friend friendly and good Community for uh the developer ecosystem right now is kind of that the right choice in terms of social graph versus no social maybe like specify the question yeah um so a if if you're not building a client obviously um could you give us some reasons why is it worth to build on top of foraster versus trying to kind of bootstrap your own social graph Okay so it's a great question and I think it's a question that is like really relevant today uh many Founders are going both routes and actually we had a discussion about it uh few weeks ago I don't remember with whom but I have a very strong opinion on this so the question like depends like if you're building a new company you you're building a new consumer product um you want your app in the future to have millions of daily active users um what do you do do you use forecaster profiles or do you build like your own you know system of profiles and people need to sign up and essentially you have this tradeoff if you go with farcaster it's easier for existing forecaster users to on board and you can like you know latch onto this the social graph and get some like you know free distribution from forecaster um but at the same time the moment when you outgrow farcaster and farcaster is not huge yet uh you know suddenly you know you need to unboard People by by again paying the signup fee you need to go through this hardles and you know you kind of add value to someone's else's like protocol or platform so you have this question right and I see a lot of apps launching without forecaster these days I think there was a period when like it was like cool to launch forecaster now for the past two three months less so um and I personally think it's a it's a large mistake I think it's a it's an ego mistake where like you think as a as a social founder you know you you actually have what it takes to build like a an app with millions of users and you will scale so fast or like in reality you've never built anything with like you know any significant retention and a lot of people like that just like fall in this ego ego trap or like hey I will build it much better I don't need distribution for foraster I don't need distribution from from from warcast and I'm going to do it by myself maybe I'll add like some forecaster features later but if you are a Founder that has to make this decision I strongly advise just like connect to forecaster and worry about this problem later because you get such an insane distribution uh just be from being on warcast feed from being able to connect to to frames to get distribution from from existing forecaster user base and you know if if you ever outgrow if you ever actually outgrow foraster which is like one good luck with this like you know building an up with 50,000 100,000 Theus is is already a challenge uh if you can do it you can can like also like turn it off at any time you can just like okay these people were on board with forecaster but like from now we actually you know stop sending data to the protocol that's also totally possible um so yeah these days I think any social Founders like for anyone for any social founder in crypto it should be really really mindless and simple decision to to bootstrap their social graphs on forecaster and I honestly think anyone making a different decision is making a mistake um well yeah that's my honest opinion massive Round of Applause for watch guys come on so you have some good question there bro amazing amazing and quick one for me are you going to be attending the hackin over the next couple days uh I may sure up yeah yeah perfect so come find him guys ask him away about supercaster let let's go I mean it's been it's been a great session from you today packed out house as well so we're actually driving one more round of applause there guys we're actually going to jump