@jacek

helluva journey on farcaster. i first found it in 2023, almost by accident, after seeing someone mention it on x. i signed up without knowing much about what i was walking into. one of my earliest memories is from a trip to sicily with my then-girlfriend, now wife. we were staying in a pretty grungy airbnb and couldn’t figure out the wifi password someone had scribbled on a piece of paper. i took a picture, posted it on farcaster, and a bunch of people started trying to decode it with us. we eventually got it. i remember thinking then there was something different about this place. it felt more like a room full of people you wanted to be around. not long after, i found the /degen channel. that little corner of farcaster ended up changing my life. $DEGEN grew out of it and grew into something much bigger than i ever expected. for a long time during the initial days of degen, my days were basically farcaster data, neynar APIs, scripts, dashboards, queries and bugs. i typed my FID into so many searches and debug queries that i now know it by heart. 1-5-9-8-3. decentralized social. what a beautiful idea. that something as fundamental as the way we communicate with each other could be open. that your identity, your connections and the things you create wouldn’t have to belong to a single company. that builders could build on top of it, and users could take themselves somewhere else if they wanted to. i still think @dwr and @v were onto something. maybe the timing wasn’t right. maybe the product wasn’t right. maybe decentralized social needs a catalyst that hasn’t happened yet. maybe it never becomes as big as some of us hoped. i don’t know. but i do think the world could genuinely benefit from it. social networks are too important to our lives to be entirely controlled behind a handful of closed doors. these days, a lot of crypto-native apps seem built around increasingly shorter time horizons. make money quickly, capture attention quickly, move on quickly. farcaster never really felt like that to me. it felt like people were trying to build something that might actually last. maybe it didn’t all work. good things rarely move in a straight line. but i’m happy i got to be part of it. a lot of good memories were made here. a lot of good people met. a lot of talented, stubborn builders kept showing up and trying. and somewhere along the way, this weird little social network gave us $DEGEN. not bad for something i randomly heard about on x. thanks for everything @rish @manan @dwr @v, the original team, and everyone in the community who made it what it was. farcaster was gud tech.

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