tomato

@tomatoxyz

319 Following

78 Followers

kepano pfp

these AI vs AI arms races will accelerate everywhere adversarial contexts exist: homework, hiring, sales, procurement, etc the instinct is to add more complexity, more steps, but this doesn't work — it weeds out humans not AIs the solution is to simplify, de-escalate

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Trigs pfp

🧵 Summary Thread: Just wrapped another incredible "Let's Talk About /DAOs" call! 🔥 Here's what we discussed that every DAO builder needs to hear 👇 https://x.com/i/spaces/1eaKbWQeMNBGX 📋 The Missing Piece: Org Guidelines @stellaachenbach dropped this gem: DAOs need "organizational guidelines" just like brand guidelines - but for operations. Concise docs with graphics that clear up misunderstandings without walls of text. Why don't more DAOs have this? 🤔 --- 🏓 The Ping-Pong Problem @tomatoxyz shared a brutal reality check: watched his DAO take 4 MONTHS to decide on hiring a translator, and a YEAR for a Twitter manager. Discord = decision-making quicksand. Everything becomes an endless back-and-forth with no resolution. --- ⚖️ Legal Reality Check @thethriller with the truth bomb: "You don't get to choose whether to be a legal entity. The law decides for you." No documentation? You're still a general partnership by default. Better to define it yourself than let courts decide later. --- 😤 DAO Burnout is Real Heartbreaking stories of contributor churn, accountability failures, and people leaving Web3 entirely. Key insight: We're trying to speedrun 5 years of organizational problems into months without proper foundations. --- 🎯 Vision Alignment Crisis Even when people "love the protocol," they often have completely different visions of what it should be. Most DAOs skip the basics: clear mission statements and theory of change. How can you coordinate without knowing WHY you exist? --- 🏛️ The Federation Future @1a35e1's vision: Think beyond individual DAOs. How can decentralized orgs cooperate at scale? Need that North Star goal for prioritization. Web3's superpower isn't just decentralization - it's coordination at scale. --- 💡 Old World Wisdom @kyngkai909's insight: DAOs aren't definitions of legal entities - they're operational methodologies. We keep reinventing wheels instead of learning from decades of organizational design. Corporate world has solutions. We just need to adapt them. --- 🐝 The Beehive Dream @stellaachenbach's vision: DAOs that work like beehives (but for humans). Gradual decentralization: centralized → less centralized → less centralized. You can't force autonomy overnight. It's a process. --- 🚪 Vote With Your Feet @uhthred's advice for burnout: Move faster when something isn't working. Don't stay in dysfunctional environments. "I'd rather be poor in this space than rich in a bullshit arena like investment banking." --- 🔧 Use the Tools! @Wasabi's call to action: Stop creating new problems! Use proven Web3 primitives like rage quit, merit-based governance, reputation systems. Problem: We optimize for liquidity instead of empowering operators. --- 🎭 The Unlock Example Shoutout to @Unlock-Protocol for showing gradual decentralization in action and creating actual organizational guidelines. Plus they gave us all attendance NFTs! 🎫 --- 📞 Join Us Next Week! These conversations are pure gold for anyone building in the DAO space. Real talk about real problems with real solutions. Weekly call, same time. Bring your experiences, questions, and hot takes. Who's in? 👥 Next week's space: https://x.com/i/spaces/1gqxvjEBqkqxB

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Danica Swanson pfp

Slowcore Quote of the Day "...it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world." ~ Alan Watts From "The Way of Zen" (1957)

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Sofia Garcia pfp

Really gr8 read so far (!)

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tomato pfp

If you type the right words in a DAO - you can build an expectation of accountability and start the wheels of action. Even if you end up being "timed out" for an entire week: "Your silence brought about this new development, let’s see what it brings" I think writing is an underappreciated element of DAOs - it is the bedrock of everything and is what causes actions to actually happened.

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tomato pfp

I want longer posts! The current character limit is an impediment and means I have to make multiple posts instead of one that contains everything I want to say. It's not a dealbreaker but is frustrating. I kind of feel like if users want to make a long, detailed post they should be able to do so. It would also be really nice to be able to include more than 2 links.

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tomato pfp

I'm not intimately up to date but I think the focus I have seen so far is for people to build more and more apps - I kind of get the feeling that many of these may end up as abandonware. I made a very extensive set of posts about previous Farcaster ecosystem projects that just end up idle/broke/unmaintained before but it got little response: https://farcaster.xyz/tomatoxyz/0xea755a07 Building a great ecosystem should focus on people and groups primarily before fancy apps/technology. You need to have a sticky way to get users to join and stay - that should be at the root of all decisions. You want the best users to congregate and have a mechanism to build apps/ideas from the bottom-up instead of having people trying to build things top-down. (2/2)

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tomato pfp

There's a great amount of valuable users on Farcaster and while miniapps and other things are interesting, I really feel like groups are the superpower and are underappreciated. I think groups should be given DAO-like powers and have their own budgets and decision trees that they create on how to reward existing users as well as how to attract new users. (1/2)

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vrypan |--o--| pfp

The Farcaster ecosystem largely revolves around two main providers: Merkle Manufactory (MM) and Neynar. Both offer services that span the full stack, from low-level infrastructure (like Snapchain nodes) to end-user clients and miniapp tooling. I consider node improvements, specs, and documentation part of their offering in this context. This creates a resource allocation dilemma. As a startup with limited time and engineers, you naturally focus where ROI is highest. Right now, that seems to be at the top of the stack: ROI = end user growth. But this focus narrows innovation. While low-level infra allows many creative paths, the higher up you go, the fewer options you have. MM and Neynar appear to prioritize miniapps, wallets, and small UX features (like profile banners or max number of cast embeds). This is also reflected in the uneven documentation quality (ex., there is a dedicated website for miniapp development, 99% of the documentation is about using js/ts, the migration from hubble to snapchain is hardly reflected in the docs, and so on). The result: it’s increasingly difficult to build anything truly new. If you’ve tried using the low-level stack, you’ve likely hit countless friction points: a small detail here, a small detail there, a change that has not reached the docs yet, FIPs that would have made your life much easier but are of low priority, design decisions optimized for quick user growth and not DX. I know the answer: demand is king. I generally agree. But, maybe user growth is in places not on the path already laid out. And my concern is that diverging from this path, is getting harder and harder.

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tomato pfp

This is a brilliant weekly newsletter that covers a lot of high-value events in the DAO space. Well worth a follow! https://x.com/DAOscope/status/1934322321503777154

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JA Westenberg pfp

@joanwestenberg.eth

Everyone you meet in 2025 is either: – Trying to become a YouTuber – Trying to become a landlord – Trying to become a podcaster – Trying to become your problem

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keccers pfp

Would bet my life this isn’t the only instance of this, just the only one who was stupid enough to get caught The firm self described as “not your daddy’s typical VC firm.” https://sfstandard.com/2025/06/13/russia-ukraine-sanctions-putin-venture-capital-peskin/

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tomato pfp

Would love to hear about how you did this. I use notion for personal tasks etc and not just writing so not sure if obsidian would be the right fit.

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Danica Swanson pfp

This weekend's reading: "Last Artist Standing: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life Over 50" by Sharon Louden. This is the third and final book of personal essays in the author's trilogy that includes "Essays by 40 Working Artists" (2013) and "The Artist as Culture Producer" (2017). My local library just got a copy and I had it on hold, so I'm the first to check it out. Excited to dig in.

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tomato pfp

@rafa I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think a place like this exists within "web3"/cryptocurrency - and if not how do we build something like it?

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rafa pfp

Even as a far expert, you need to continue reading and commission work from peers, tempting to think that there isn’t anything new to learn when beyond the horizon of standard knowledge

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tomato pfp

Who is building not a "project", "organization" or "product" but specifically "the place" with the right people to congregate and critically discuss DAOs and "web3" that isn't a soulless money grab and that rather than being infected with VC money has the very best people sowing the current desolate earth to plant the right seeds for the right crops and right trees to build an everlasting forest? Where is the "real internet" in this space? Where are the "real people"? (screenshot shows a blog post that I wrote 13 years ago that was a condolence for a dear friend and mentor who passed away and acted as a bedrock and inspiration for me and many other people and was one of those people that was special enough to build and nurture an interesting and diverse garden that turned into a forest - these people are ever so rare)

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tomato pfp

In the context of DAOs - likewise to the informal IRC "powerhouse" community I am describing in the below conversation - when I was a young kid, I got into a very private IRC network filled with hardcore cypherpunks and hackers who were because of passion. Many of them went on to hold extremely high level positions and did stuff like reverse engineering and investigating malware like Stuxnet. One problem with "web3"/cryptocurrency is that it has been become very, very "strictly corporate" - how or who is planning on building a place for the very best people in DAOs which has actual soul and activity from the best of the best and isn't build with the idea of becoming a microtransaction haven with trickle incentive programs that just end up with extreme sybil attacks and attracting low-value and noisy people?

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tomato pfp

I dearly miss the great art of conversation over protocols like IRC where people gathered around actual watering holes that required skill and social bonds to maintain (IRC required either hosting a server or using complex bots and other things to make shit work - any idiot can set up a Discord server) and would be populated by people who would openly challenge your ideas, call you an idiot and sign off by saying "Nobody cares. Kill yourself." before banning you. This to be followed up by one of the grandmasters of Bitcoin saying they thought you were "absolutely endearing" - I feel a great loss when I look at the current state of web3 but maybe danielpbarron was right when he said: "Yes! Stay on irc 24/7! Forget the forum -- forget reddit; those are distractions."

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tomato pfp

My experience crossing paths with Mircea Popescu was immortalized on his blog here: http://trilema.com/2015/a-sjsqd-walks-into-a-pub/ An absolutely fascinating character and despite whatever immense controversy his attitude, presence, ideas and personality may have shown and caused people to immensely dislike him, he spoke his own truth and was an embodiment of the "real internet" and not the very "strictly corporate" personalities that have since taken over cryptocurrency and the internet. Very sad that he passed away. I met many people like Mircea (albeit generally less controversial) through my travels on the internet who also spoke their own truth - it is a great loss to the world that IRC and self-hosted blogs/websites have largely been replaced by Discord/X/Twitter and highly corporate, slickly branded shit which is devoid of actual soul.

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