Farcaster

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i don’t like to toot my own horn, but i correctly predicted selfie video would become dominant on farcaster months ago. 

my next prediction is that Farcaster Events will be the next retentive feature for fc. 
Events will visualizes social participation, mixing influences of Fb Events, Luma, and @crowdfund’s share card. It will be the best place to see what’s going on in crypto irl. 

ogs complaining about selfies in the feed today will be drawn further into fc by the unparalleled irl experience fc will provide crypto natives at irl meetups. 

people reluctant to join fc will install the app thanks to the WoM peer pressure from friends using the Events feature. 

people will decide which cons to attend months in advance based on social density of fc profiles marked attending. 

people will choose between side events based on social density of checked in attendees. 

the opt in nature of public event attendance will marry the appeal of snap maps style miniapps like wyat and frens v1 with limited disclosure concerns re: wrench attacks. 

farcaster events will be widely compared to facebook events in crypto news outlets and on ct. people will demand private attendance features and suggest world integration. old accounts will reactivate when attending devconnect, permissionless, ethdenver, and ethcc. these will be signs of its success.

Author of The Network State.
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I completely agree. 

I believe that killer feature that would work really well on here is paripatetic discourse, fostering front-facing video ideational maieutic dialog that would establish @farcaster as the decentralized, permissionless programable agora we so badly for existential reasons, including the viabilty of the network states to come… 

I’m posting a four-part video series where I walk and talk across West Chelsea to Little Island and narrate these thoughts live. The video is the primary text—a demonstration of embodied, spontaneous, human discourse. This written version is only a derivative summary of that more authentic record (a hierarchy I’m sure Derrida would object to).

Ironically, even producing and posting these videos (has proved the whole point. I’ve tried to upload them multiple times, and each attempt has crashed in one way or another. I think I’m going to have to post four replies including all four videos, because I can’t post them to one post. Captions are a separate challenge entirely. The friction and technical hurdles are exactly why very few, save for that one based rhetrical genius @jessepollak, and the reincarnation of robert bly @jabo5779, posts them routinely, despite how valuable they are for proof of human personhood and authentic engagement. This effort is a labor of love, but it highlights how far the platform still has to go if it wants to make video-first discourse accessible and scalable. 

I completely agree with you that Farcaster is best in class on the technical front: wallet integrations, programmable infrastructure, mini apps, economic incentives. But the killer feature—the one no other platform can replicate—is something older than any blockchain: a true decentralized, permissionless, programmable Agora.

In ancient Greece, the Agora was where citizens met to debate, dissent, and deliberate. No bots, no fake Socrates. Yes there was commerce, but it was predominantly for real humans in real dialogue.

Today, that’s the existential question: whether we can build a decentralized, censorship-resistant space for authentic human discourse. A place where ideas, not just tips and tokens, can flourish.

Text is cheap and getting cheaper. Soon, with agentic AI like Project Mariner, anyone can automate replies, simulate engagement, and flood the forum with glazed consensus. That reality makes front-facing video—real voices, real bodies, real birkenstocks, real hawaiian shirts from Opening Ceremony, real faces, real places—the most valuable and defensible medium. It’s still hard to fake, and it solves both the Sybil problem and the question of authenticity.

Imagine if Farcaster prioritized effortless creation of these videos:

	•	Native tools to record video, caption video, and segment video, perhaps with a custom caption font (purple and designed @j4ck.eth!) 
	•	Auto-generated text summaries for sharing the post in the feed and discoverability.
	•	An overall design that elevates dialogue over engagement farming.

Yes, incentives have a role, but economic rewards alone can’t attract the people who care most about governance, ideas, and the good. Those people come for the discourse itself.

We’ve all seen what happens when platforms drift into “token go up” culture. The Agora dissolves into distraction.

This is why I think you, Balaji, are uniquely positioned to guide Farcaster  and @dwr.eth toward becoming the civic space the network states need—a place where humans, not bots, debate the future.

I suspect @base is going to build one hell of highly social wallet, and sub-accounts will change the game but i fear that nothing styled and framed as a “wallet” can ever be a true agora, because wallets inherently privilege commercial and transactional engagement (over pleasurable ones, not to mention aristotles’ @codeofcrypto pursuit of the good, the auto-telic end that should be our north star)

Thanks again for all you’ve contributed to putting these questions front and center.


PART 1:

i love this prediction re selfie vids
but is that the case?
are they in fact the dominant content form on fc?
i only seem a handful 
for instance, im the only person doing them as replies to this balaji post

https://farcaster.xyz/marmo.eth/0x02dd53c1

and videos are still extraordinarily hard to make and upload with the the existing fc app
 
- uploads take forever (nonsensically cycles through finishing uploading and other steps that are meaningless to users)

- no auto caption - one must use expensive and clunky third  party software to do that, limiting the potential reach of videos 

- discovery is very hard. i mean, @mjc716  built @walkntalk but the platform itself and its algo do not prioritize selfie video

i think there’s a lot more to do on video before moving on to events. events could work but lu.ma sort of nails it tbh.

app developer /spotlight | MediaFi & Attention Markets

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director of product @seedclub. we built @crowdfund. i design & dev social, crypto, and ai software. i interview crypto builders @ web3galaxybrain.com.