Last month, I mentioned that I was shelving the onchain project where I was initially planning on spending time early this year. Almost immediately following my sending that email, a new development occurred that could change my area of focus...
Anyone who's spoken with me recently knows about my love/hate relationship with
social media. Early on, there was so much potential, but the big promise of building 'community' never materialized. Instead, they almost all became an advertising weapon and/or a firehose of data featuring the worst that humanity (and automated bots) have to offer. I've been slowly trying to leave traditional social media, but anyone who's tried this, knows that getting everyone to move with you and create greener pastures elsewhere is impossible.
Because of this, I've developed a few rules for anything 'new' that I think about using. It needs to offer an easy means for porting my 'social graph'. Additionally, it must prioritize creators. I should be the one who benefits from anything that I create and not someone who can take away my reach at a moments notice. It absolutely needs to have a plan for verifying the integrity of the other 'users' of the system. Finally, it
needs to be able to do all of this without the fear that the company backing it will disappear over night. I've tried several different 'apps' that meet most of these criteria. They all take very different approaches in how they go about doing each of these. Until last month, there wasn't really a clear winner in my mind.
This all changed with Farcaster's announcement of Frames. Farcaster is open source and decentralized. As long as people continue to use it, it's not going anywhere. Each account in Farcaster is backed by cryptographically signed identity. In the future, it will be easy to verify all sorts of things about 'messages' and who is sending them in order to build social media apps that prioritize creators without sacrificing privacy. That's my high level
pitch for the protocol, now onto Frames.
Frames allow you to turn any 'tweet' (called 'casts' in Farcaster) into an interactive app. This is all based on the Open Graph Protocol. Combine this with the identity and payment mechanisms that already exist in the protocol and you have a new compelling app distribution environment outside of traditional
walled gardens. I haven't been this excited about building things since the early days of mobile! If you're interested in knowing more about my preference for Farcaster, drop me a line. If you want to try it out for yourself, I've got a few invites to Warpcast (a Farcaster client) available.
From social media to
just being social... I wanted to mention how great the local area has become in terms of supporting up and coming live music. Free Will Brewing's Perkasie location has put an enormous amount of effort into redesigning their space to attract great bands. The newest entrant in this space is Dharma Bums just north of New Hope. I was just there again on Saturday night and it inspired me to reread a certain Jack Kerouac classic.
