@balajis.eth

Hello everyone! Network School is acquiring Farcaster. Our goal is to turn this client into a family-friendly place where you can learn technology, earn cryptocurrency, have fun with the community, achieve your milestones in life, and gradually build a high-trust offline society. Anyone of any race, religion, class, or nationality is welcome so long as they cooperate with other members and share broadly techno-optimist values (a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/). To get there, we’ll need a new moderation policy. Rather than the Soviet Union of digital tyranny which typified the 2010s, or the Somalia of lawless digital anarchy that characterizes today’s online environment, we seek to intentionally build the first Singapore of social media. We get there in four steps: institute law-and-order, create a decentralized democracy, publish a written social smart contract, and then hold an ongoing series of meetups with our newly invigorated community. (1) Step one is law and order. In the pre-Internet world, it was simply unheard of to run up to a stranger and start cursing at them. We’re restoring that offline norm online. Much like how President Bukele jailed a small fraction of repeat offenders to essentially eliminate crime (https://tinyurl.com/39hwed77) in El Salvador, we’ve moderated out the small fraction of repeat offenders that have been muted or blocked by many accounts to stop random attacks within this Farcaster reference client. We’ve done this by using both humans and AI to crunch millions of posts. Of course, there will always be some false positives, and we do have an appeals process in the event you either (a) believe your account was unfairly moderated or (b) believe you were fairly moderated, but want to commit to changing your behavior in the future. From one vantage point, other social media platforms have had a moderation-and-appeal process for a long time, so in one sense we’re really just catching up on technical debt and getting to industry standard. However, in another sense, unlike pre-existing tech platforms, we’re actually being very concrete about the techno-optimist values we stand for — and giving you a concrete democratic choice over your digital governance, which leads us to step two. (2) Step two is decentralized digital democracy. As described at farcaster.xyz/~/vote, you can vote with your crypto wallet, your onchain ballot, and eventually your feet (via a Farcon/NS meetup) for our social Singapore. Many of you have already done so, like @linda, @mazmhussain, and @phil. In fact, as of the time of this writing, we’re at 92.9% support for Network School Farcaster, and you can see the onchain votes provably streaming in here: basescan.org/token/0x4ecfed276c566aeb49da1f3a888e8dbb7263028d Of course, you can also vote for another client, or build your own. After all, the Farcaster client has been open sourced (github.com/farcasterxyz/client), and the Farcaster protocol is already open. So with today’s AI tooling you can rapidly boot up whatever client you want. The only limitation is the same one the Ethereum Foundation implements: you can’t use Farcaster, Warpcast, Neynar, Network State, or Network School-related names to launch any coin, token, or commercial project. You can use the Farcaster protocol under the hood, just like Google uses Linux under the hood, but you can’t call your app or digital asset Farcaster itself. The goal is to prevent user confusion and crypto scams. (3) Step three towards building the first Singapore of social media is to publish examples of good and bad behavior, what an earlier generation might call “Goofus and Gallant.” We have a v1 of the social smart contract and the corresponding "Network Code" up at farcaster.xyz/~/contract. We’ll update it over time with specific AI prompts, concrete examples of pro-social behavior that we want in the app (like posting technical tutorials, hosting offline events, and the like) and also examples of anti-social behavior that we don’t want. (4) Finally, step four is to begin hosting online and offline meetups with the community of members that have opted into the new vision. We may do a meetup like Farcon (https://farcon.xyz), an in-person event at Network School in Astana, or an online event like our previous 1729 VR meetups (https://x.com/mckaywrigley/status/1466287496589840392), or all of the above. In each case, admission will be at least partially token-gated to those who voted for the new social smart contract. This way we start from a baseline of common values, techno-optimist goals, and provable democratic legitimacy. From that solid foundation, we can build a true digital community. And together we can cooperate at a scale no social network has ever seen before. So, that's the idea. We’re looking forward to building the first Singapore of social media with you. If you want to join us, please make your choice at farcaster.xyz/~/vote.

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