GM casters ☀️ 

Doing an AMA for the next few hours since it's been a while. Hit me with your questions!

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

Chasing Curiosity. People, Nature, Machines. Hakuna Matata, "Its a problem-free philosophy.”

- It is manageable only b/c @shilpa is extremely supportive and we're fortunate to able to afford childcare

- I don't have a good answer, have to think more on this. 

- Being stubborn and not giving up (also a superweakness in some cases)

How’s it been trying to raise a family and be a founder? 

What are some of the less known things about being a CTO of a startup? 

What’s your superpower?

Hey, I was in Goa in 2008 as well! It would have been around early November/late October, mostly Anjuna Benaulim and Baga. I wonder if our paths crossed.

Hilltop, Goa one night in 2008. No idea who was playing but we danced till the sun rose.

what has been the most important rave you’ve ever been to? (important not in the sense of “big”. im picturing the whole scene. being there. the people you were with. the music. it all.)

who was playing?

A read-only app that helps people find interesting people, channels and casts based on your prior history.

Are there any particular Farcaster client ideas that you would like to see someone build?

We now tend to think in terms of concrete use cases instead of abstract ideologies: i.e. what can I build that 1000+ users will use tomorrow?

Documentation and tooling are the biggest dev painpoints, so we are 100% focussed on that for the next month.

how do you plan to encourage identity composability going into 2024?

how important are node packages and developer relations compared to protocol improvements?

working on receipts.xyz // workout. earn points. /receipts

INVITE CODE: EARNED

Waiting for when we can start creating channels of our own. 🙏🏻

Very different paths 

- Warps: we thought of it one afternoon, shipped it in a few days, and people loved it. 

- Channels: deliberate planning, lots of iterations, still feels like a lot more to be done before its clearly working.

what was the behind the scenes like navigating the idea maze for warps & channels?

both seem to be important primitives that the team is betting big on right now

musician: gigameshmusic.com | dev: github.com/gigamesh

Great info thank you 🙏 

“Feeds of activity are not interesting”…
Are you just referring to the passive feeds like “friend minted x”? Assuming you’re not including interactive feeds (ex: chat)?

- It is very hard to intuit good social ideas, your best approach is to ship insanely fast and hope to find something sticky.  

- Push and email is incredibly important to scaling social. 

- Feeds of activity (onchain or otherwise) are not interesting. 

- Protocols are stupid hard to build, avoid wherever possible.

Biggest unexpected things you’ve learned while building Farcaster & Warpcast so far?

Aviator, diver, Etherean, nexialist, PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

Vampire attacks draw mercenaries. 

For a financial protocol, it's fine I don't care who the person is as long as their money is good. 

For a social protocol, it could actually make the social network significantly worse. 

There might be a more subtle way to do this, but I haven't figure it out yet.

cto @ bwl.gg, 100M+ users (bdut.ch) 🙏 $eggs is life

you're in french mcdonalds, you order fries, they come with mayo

your reaction?

Could you plz say more about the downsides of integrating xmtp for DCs?

To me the problem is that DMs are only on warpcast mobile. I wanna DM ppl on web, supercast, flink, etc 

If your algo were open then I would not care about xmtp vs DCs, but I hear that’s several months away

If that’s true, maybe doing xmtp instead is a similar amount of work?

I like the XMTP folks and their mission, but right now who do you want to talk to that is active on XMTP?

If we spent time ripping out DCs and integrating XMTP right now, we'd have: 
- Weaker encryption 
- More systemic complexity for clients 
- No material improvement for our users

weird internet kid. word rotator. yapping on /okbanger. playing with @wannanaplabs. curating in /cameron | dev + vet + HBS. 
seemore.tv/cameron 🫡

The honest answer is, I don't know! 

Intuition says that if we can create sub-spaces for people (i..e channels) micro-cultures can emerge that feel cohesive but benefit from being part of a larger network of users.

How long do you think a cohesive “Farcaster vibe” can last?

What are the limiters/bottlenecks you see with that?

Arsenal | Working on algorithmic public goods funding at tea

I'll call it a superpower when Farcaster gets 1M DAU :) 

It's easy to do, just keep asking yourself "what would it take to ship this one day faster" again and again and again until you have something you can ship in a few days.

DWR once said your greatest superpower as a technical leader is limiting scope. Do you agree, and how do you accomplish this?

internet citizen, DAO cartographer, EVM whisperer & chaos magician.  spin bits for fun/profit, watch out for my MegaByte!

It's something we're likely to explore with warps soon.

As @owocki mentioned, it would be interesting to implement QF on top of FC. 

From my understanding, the basic primitive we need is tipping. Does this sound like a useful feature for FC/Warpcast?

If I can add one more - who or what was most helpful in determining your structure and other legal questions?

Very little, we've kept our structure as simple as humanly possible so we can focus on building.

Roughly how much in legal fees have you guys paid to lawyers for farcaster?

Productizing RWAfi @plumenetwork. Letting you earn from all RWAs on Plume using https://nest.credit. Hosting /rwa, /plume, /nest and https://palmer.earth

Try Yussef Dayes for jazz, I feel like you might enjoy it!

- A mix of electronic (Nicholas Jarr, Kerry Chandler, Donato Dozzy)
- Black Metal (Agalloch, Behemoth) 
- Jazz influenced (Moses boyd, Ezra Collective)
- Rock (Radiohead, Yves Tumor) 
- Hip Hop (MF Doom)

What music have you been listening to lately?

- Hang with the kiddo and wife 
- Play board games and sometimes video games 
- Live music (though less since I moved to LA)

what do you like to do for fun on the weekends?

Dad, geek, conversation liquidity provider. vrypan.net (home), @l--o--l (fun). devcoin:$lemon3

The biggest unlock with warps is how simple they make transacting, especially cross chain. 

Focus will be on finding things people are doing onchain and then enabling that with warps wherever feasible.

warps could evolve in a number of different ways. What are one or two that seem potentially attractive to you?

Working on @getpara | writing and thinking about crypto, global economies, and media 👩🏻‍💻

https://x.com/adeets_22

Yes I am! How do I add an account? Is this written up somewhere, I’m happy to go through the flow 🙏

Are you on iOS 17? You can switch between accounts easily using passkeys

An extremely delayed question – what's the thinking about account management on the Warpcast client today? Many of us have 2 accounts (not sure if this is standard. In my case, my personal and a company account) and have trouble switching between the two 

How are you thinking about this & what are the tradeoffs?

Co-founder of @buidler. Building /community-notes

Some people said that the growth of a team reflects the growth of a product. So, do you think Farcaster is developing somewhat cautiously?

team is 10 full time plus a couple of contractors, plan to add 1-2 more people at most

How many people are working in Team Farcaster currently? 
Do you have any plans for further expansion?

we have a lot of ideas, but we want to figure out the growth mechanic that will get us to 1M+ users and then figure out a pricing model that is compatible with that

Have you ever considered a freemium model or other pricing models for FC?