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Building in public with open social graphs
Recorded: July 24, 2025 Duration: 1:05:44Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion among crypto developers, key trends emerged highlighting the shift towards more intimate and specialized events, the potential for growth through onboarding non-crypto users, and the importance of community feedback in shaping applications. The conversation also underscored the evolving relationship between traditional finance and crypto, as well as the collaborative spirit driving innovation within the Farcaster ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. How are we doing?
All right.
I see I was made a co-host, so hopefully that doesn't crash spaces.
I'm still so tentative about the co-host button here.
I appreciate you, Jeff, for opening up the space for us today.
I'm going to invite some of our friends up to speak.
It should be fun.
I'm actually very excited about today.
It should be excellent.
You'd like to excuse my voice on teeth.
It's not functioning very well.
Oh, I understand, buddy.
I hope you feel better soon, too.
I don't know what you have, but yeah, anything with the throat is just tough.
Can you hear me? Yep, Jim Limonet. How you doing? Jim, Jim, we're doing great. What about you?
I'm doing good. We're doing really good. Hey, Sam. Samuel, how are you doing?
How are you?
Doing good.
Awesome.
Doing great, too.
And then waiting for Matthew.
I'm going to give him a few minutes here.
I did just message him a little while ago.
Sorry, he'll be up here shortly.
But in the meantime, to kind of warm up or cold open here,
Limonet, Samuel, how are you liking the base app
since the update?
I'm pretty sure you both had access
to it before everyone else did, at least the latest update.
Well, technically, nobody has access
beyond who gets into the beta today.
So still very gated and secluded i'd say
but yeah we're like at falcon everyone who was at falcon got access and both of us were at falcon
oh yeah yeah sorry i meant like before they rolled out updates i i thought some of you might have uh
gotten first access just to test nobody outside of no nobody like really outside of who was working on the app had access
as far as far as my knowledge maybe along with that yeah i can confirm same year but i i really actually what I'd seen before the base event, I mean, was just, you know, I don't know how
to call it, but more of an alpha, let's say, because like some of the things that they
announced and showed live on stage, like the PacePay or the content coins embedded within the feeds.
I really didn't have any clue about that.
Of course, I was debugging mini apps and using the basic interface and what was there,
but Zora coins were not on my list.
Wow, that's cool.
So they did a really good job of keeping that under wraps.
Usually when you have such a huge update, there's, I don't want to call it a leak,
but it's really hard to keep a lid on something like that.
Just because it's such a huge shift from everything we're used to, it was a pretty big update.
Not just for Coinbase Wallet but for like wallets and maybe
even social altogether yeah totally i don't know how they did that but uh i was like super excited
and surprised at the same time to see these new you know announcements at the event in Los Angeles. Yeah.
Well, it was great seeing y'all, even for a little bit.
I know it was kind of hard to just hang out for too long because there's just so many people and so much happening.
But either way, it was great to see kind of like what,
I'm going to say what Farcon started for base to continue this really felt like an extension
of Farcon I don't know if you would agree with that maybe it's just because it's the same people
kind of yeah different type of event but as you mentioned like I feel the vibe and the people and you know even like
the best users that I know in the space
were there so
of course like Samuel you were not
there but I really love what you're
doing so I'm not saying
again
I agree with you that was similar vibe
yeah I've mentioned it to this in this space before that I agree with you that was team in our vibe.
Yeah, I've mentioned it to this in this space before that what's really kind of, I've seen a shift. I've been going to crypto events since 2016 and I've seen a shift happening in the last like two years and accelerating within the last year, which is these really massive events, like your ETH
Denver's and ETH CC's all of this year sounds like it was a little bit better. Um, there's almost
like this, uh, desire to want to have things that are a little bit more intimate and conversations that are a little bit more kind of unified
versus just so broad, maybe specialized in a better way, instead of it being so broadly
like, hey, we're all going to, you know, bring crypto to the masses and billion users and
the usual kind of, you know, big words that most crypto events have been saying since like i'm sure even before 2016
where now i feel like people really want to meet people who are building things that they're
personally interested in or experiences you know like be part of an experience that is uniquely part of their own kind of subculture.
And Farrakhan definitely kind of, to me, was a turning point two years ago when I went.
And to see it kind of continue to evolve into things like what SEST and the base event was
last year in the desert.
Like, I really think that those events
are really kind of changing the way that we approach crypto and um kind of participate in the culture
and we have matthew in the audience good to see see you, bringing you up. Awesome.
All right. Since we have everybody here, let's get started.
I'm gonna ask everyone to just give a brief introduction
to themselves so that we can have this
for anybody who listens to it after,
understand where y'all coming from,
the things that you're building
and how it connects to
the story that we want to tell today, which is onboarding and how that's evolving. You know,
whether you want to call it crypto web through your on chain, how it's changed, and how developers
like yourselves are approaching onboarding in this new kind of paradigm, which is pretty much,
at least in my opinion, heavily being lifted by social. So let's get started on my directly to
my right is Limonet. Did you want to if you could give a brief introduction to yourself on what you're building, and then we'll move to Matthew.
Yeah, 100%.
So, yeah, I'm Limone from Rome, Italy,
software engineer, founder,
and now doing product in Builders Garden.
It's a developer studio that I co-founded,
actually, one year and a half ago.
We started building decentralized web applications
for clients as well as acting on our own ideas.
And now we're fully focused on mini apps.
So we've been for more than a year
like building around for Custer,
as you were mentioning, like the social space.
And in the last months, as soon as, you know, like these mini-apps came out, we started,
you know, focusing full time on that.
And I guess our biggest success so far has been Farbill, which is a farming simulation
game that you can play on Forecaster, of course inspired to
to Farmville, the gold Farmville and yeah right now we are building a bunch of games
on both like Forecaster and Base as well as helping third parties or companies that want to
ship a mini app but don't know how to how to do that and relative to
onboarding i think that social and these mini apps in particular and finally also the base app
i think it's a big enabler for for us all building in the space because before that is what it was
like first of all really difficult to reach users and with the forecasted mini apps i think that has
been that has become like much much easier um what i think base will unlock is uh access to users
that are actually not crypto native so i'm expecting base to onboard net new users instead of
users just you know migrating from the Firecluster ecosystem.
And that's why I'm excited because now we know how to build these apps,
we know how to access users, and just the audience is shifting
to something that is more interesting, let's say.
Awesome. And I agree with you on a lot of those points.
And once we go through the introductions, I want to circle back to some of these.
Matthew, how are you doing?
What's happening? Can you hear me okay?
Loud and clear, buddy.
Yeah, if you can give a brief intro to yourself as well, please.
Yeah, beautiful. My name is Matthew Fox. I'm from Ireland.
I make stuff on the internet.
And usually it's delayed, but we keep making it into it.
Before Firecaster, I worked in an agency, ran an agency, kind of working a lot on crypto and NFT stuff in like 21, 22.
And then obviously that was a great time to be involved uh but left it like that crazy period
super curious about how everything actually worked and where it was actually going so got super in on
the tech side on the dev side was doing that for about a year or two and then last year went full
all in on firecaster because it just felt like the crypto that we were promised but uh hadn't yet
properly materialized and uh yeah very excited about where
everything is going now with base becoming another chapter in that book of that story of
what crypto was supposed to be and um yeah as far as onboarding goes i'd say onboarding's finished
a nice introduction to a more interesting internet at this point. That's awesome.
Thank you, Matthew.
And Samuel, give us a quick intro to yourself as well.
And I guess as we're going around and people
are giving their opinions of the topic,
any thoughts you have on it too?
Yeah, quickly about me.
I'm mostly running around Firecaster,
doing any kind of developer help, developer work, helping people get unstuck.
That's also what I do at work.
At work, we build Farcaster apps, we get people into Farcaster,
and we do their dev rel.
That usually involves building mini apps, building samples, showcases,
anything that helps you show off why people just love you in general.
That's been really cool.
We've been able to partner with Privy, MoFo
and a few others on that.
And generally I think on the Farcaster Mini app side,
Base just lends a lot of credibility to it
with Coinbase building out their app on top of it.
Though one thing I would note for certain
is that Base and Coinbase are a financial institution.
So we'll see how far they go onto the social side.
They for sure will go into the app side, but people expect it to at least for now
still be a wallet, which is why the home feed, if you, if you played with a better
before it, before this recent public launch use had the main tab be the home feed now it's
the app feed with like a wallet view um so i think that will just change and we're all iterating
one thing to always take of note is nobody really knows where this is going we just all love the
direction we're going towards and we're figuring out together and that's something that's really
important because people usually just like have expectations that then don't get met.
It's like, well, we're all trying to figure this out.
So have that in mind.
Awesome.
I think all great points.
has not heard of Lemone, Matthew, or Samuel, I would encourage you to check them out on
Farcaster. These are three very special human beings who are consistently building and,
like Samuel said, helping people find ways to not just use kind of Farcaster and, you know, kind of make it theirs, but
also to support them. They're very supportive to the community there who is developing as well,
so that they can, you know, kind of take advantage of some of these features that Farcaster unlocks
in an on-chain world.
So what I want to say,
I guess also introducing Ontology very quickly,
they are a builder who have for many, many years now,
since 2016, been building in the identity space.
And so if you have any kind of curiosity of the entire stack that's being built there,
go and check them out at ONT.io.
All right, so with that said,
I don't think that it's any surprise for at least us four here
that we are big fans of Farcaster
and the future that it's potentially building
and definitely the opportunity that it's already unlocked.
But before we get too deep into Farcaster, because it's very easy to get into it, I'd be curious if any one of you have any stories
about the things that you were building prior to coming onto Farcaster and some of the challenges,
and some of the challenges, especially, you know, as it relates to onboarding, that you have seen
this new kind of paradigm to open social kind of remove or at least alleviate in some way.
I'm going to start with just Limona first, but anybody can raise their hand, obviously,
or just kind of jump on in and share their thoughts.
Sure. So funny enough, before, like, how did I end up building on Forcaster?
It's because I was working with a US-based startup called Backdrop.
It's not existing anymore, but they're doing something totally different now but uh what we
were building when i was there it was like it was 2022 so even like for caster was very early
and we were exploring like a similar way in building a social graph but instead of building
it for you know like social connections a la twitter let's say we were trying to build it for professional
connections more a la linkedin so like creating work opportunities for people on an open source
of graph let's say uh and uh i did end up on forecasted because of course while building
that we were studying a bunch of existing solutions out there and so um got an invite by by then and I joined the network I think for almost a year I've been
not very active definitely not building on top of a percaster and I started building on it at an
hackathon in in Paris with my friend Greg from ENS. We were hacking together there and he was already a
prolific forcaster builder and so he introduced me to this new world and from there on I think
I never stopped. And I'm so excited about it because it you know in terms of like Lego blocks
that you can play with when it comes to building consumer applications.
I think having permission has access to all these social graph data.
It's really fun.
And I mean, one metaphor that I always love doing is around Minecraft.
When I was young, I was playing Minecraft all the time
in creative mode and having all these Lego blocks
that I could plug in together,
composability, interoperability.
These properties are pretty cool
if you know how to connect things.
And I think that social data,
it's something that has always been very difficult to access
because of gatekeepers out there.
But now with Forcaster, of course, still on a small scale, we have access to that and we can build creative things.
So I'm super excited to see, as someone said, where this is going. growing. Nobody knows, but it's exciting to be here and see everyday people coming up with new
ideas on how to combine all this data to create unique experiences out there.
Thank you. Anybody else have any kind of anecdotes in terms of some of the challenges of what they
were building and really kind of the appeal to building with this open social graph that is Farcaster.
Yeah, I'd say most of the ideas that I work on now on a daily basis
are ideas that I probably would have shelved before fire gaster so a lot of like
early iterations towards games or just interesting like mint experiences because back in the day that
was like the s tier important thing in a project launch was the mint experience being absolutely
exquisite um which you don't see as much of anywhere which is kind of sad in some ways but uh it is what it is it's growth um but yeah a lot of those things that you'd now hack together in mini app and see if
the idea is viable or if a hundred other people like it so you can go ahead and
go build it properly and that's an absolute blessing that's something that like exists
for any other medium you can capture with video but it didn't really exist for devs building
interesting or random things um like if somebody's good at piano or good at singing or good at
skateboarding somebody could take a 10 second video post on the internet and a million people
could have seen it the next day and they could be getting brand deals they could become hawk to a
girl uh you never know um and this is a similar paradigm. Obviously, the distribution isn't there.
Sam's always telling us that the future might not
always be as bright as we might want
to see it be, but we keep saying
it's going to be bright anyway.
But yeah.
Good old German
pessimism, I guess.
We definitely
need that more, what is it called, dose of reality or just generally
subdued enthusiasm.
No, it's like the one thing I try to do is I have a German negative bias in that sense
more so than the American hyperoptimist bias.
And I try to bias that out with just
somehow ending up in the middle. Like, I'm personally all in on Firecaster, just means
that I also have to be on the other hand, looking at okay, what's my risk here? What's
the upside? And then you land somewhere in the middle, and then you do really cool shit.
I just don't really like ending up in a place of just pure hopium. And then in the middle, and then you do really cool shit. I just don't really like ending up in a place of just pure hopium.
And then in the end, when the hopium runs out,
I'm kind of like an addict without its drug.
But that's just me personally.
So I always try to play both sides just in my head.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I actually wanted to see if we can touch on something that Matthew brought up, because I think that this is something that is unique to Farcaster, but you'll correct me if I'm wrong here.
you have an opportunity to connect with an early group of users that might be so far down the
rabbit hole in a niche interest that you're able to not just have them use your app, but also
get their feedback and maybe iterate in ways that they want to see. And as you continue to develop with this feedback,
you're able to create a better product, maybe something that speaks to, again, a very niche
audience, but that is unserved. Can you, anyone here who's building, you know, on Firecaster
in public, talk about the unblock that something like that enables for you.
Or is it not differentiated enough where it's actually a feature of an open social graph?
You mean like the feedback and the ability to build in public, iterate, and all this stuff?
ability to build in public, iterate, and all this stuff?
Yeah, it's this ability to, like Matthew said,
like you can post something on Farcaster, get some feedback,
and then through that feedback, start delivering updates
and maybe even the first version of a mini-app.
Just to these few people,
is that something that Farcaster enables and is unique to it,
or is that just something that is just generally accepted
and doable outside of Farcaster?
I think that it's a unique property that sometimes we give for granted
just because we've been building there for long,
but not talking about the distribution part here,
which is already great to me, but also
the fact that whatever you're building and shipping, you're shipping it on a public feed,
it already gives you a channel where to interact with your users.
And that's super powerful.
So you can not only comment and reply on that same post,
but you can also follow up on direct messages.
And honestly, I don't know if there's something like this,
I never experienced it.
So I don't know, Matthew or someone,
if you had any similar experiences in other ecosystems,
but I think it's great to be able to ship stuff
in a social feed and already have a touch point
with the user.
So you don't need to, I don't know,
send an email or move to Telegram or Twitter DMs
or Discord, you are in touch with the user
on the same platform where they are using your product somehow.
Yeah, for sure.
I think people, given the public nature of it,
they're a lot nicer than they might be in other situations.
So I don't know if anyone's ever worked
at a more traditional company or more traditional startup.
I don't know if you've ever seen their Zendesk
or their intercom inbox.
It can be pretty nasty, pretty unpleasant.
Some awful things are said in the heat of a moment by somebody who's talking through a keyboard
to a virtual person using a fake name on the other side to protect their identity.
So that's a complete 180 in the opposite direction.
I found definitely that people of Firecaster are kind of like me in a lot of ways with how they use apps.
They use an app and they're just constantly thinking it would be great if this button also did this,
or if this button was actually a little bit easier to get to,
because some people's brains are just wired that way.
Often early adopters of anything just kind of see those patterns and see these different things.
So I feel like we get a lot of that in Firecaster.
I get a lot of great ideas from people.
Ideas that if I had thought about that thing
for two seconds longer,
I might have had myself,
but I didn't.
And now I have that input from somebody
who is thinking in a very similar way.
So that's great.
That's a great upside to it.
I think, yeah,
people make the joke that everyone is a builder.
Or not a joke,
it kind of became a meme for a while.
And it's true in many
ways but it's definitely true in the sense of like everybody who is around and playing with stuff
wants to see these things do better wants to see these things do well and sometimes the feedback
is super nice and helpful maybe you should do this and then other times like you should launch
the game man and i'm like i agree i really. You're the one always pushing me to launch it.
But for me, it's probably that is existing on Farcaster. So yes, you get a lot of feedback from
users that are right there because just less friction. Like, if I want to know who built
this app, it's right up top. I can see I can just DM Matthew and be like, hey, that's broken.
Or I can be like, hey, the leaderboard looks nice that you
add isn't with Favell and all of these.
I actually also think there's not a lot of community
where this happens.
It's usually small ones that feel more like an actual community
and one thing compared to a lot of these.
Twitch, especially in like 2014, 13,
felt more like one community
and is really supportive
because you're used to at least paying five bucks
to the creators you watch regularly.
So at least you don't see ads
and you have some fun gimmicks like the emojis
which bring you into that community.
So Twitch is probably the closest,
but even on Twitch,
how hard is it for some of these creators
to get their own tools that they then launch used or to get those people into their discord or outside of just the Twitch chat?
And on Farcaster, because you have way more connection just to that one user when you have their FID, you can send push notifications if they have your app.
Like you just need to get them into your app once.
And Farcaster and Base now are building the habit of users getting into your app
so that's a superpower i think that goes beyond just the feedback culture that farcaster has due
to what matthew described actually so there's two things that i'm taking from this the one thing is
that farcaster potentially has a better community for this feedback loop because of the integrated experience.
Yes.
Where you're building something that they can use in the same app and give you feedback immediately.
Yes.
And the other thing is the likelihood that you're going to get better feedback on Firecaster than maybe if you weren't building on this open social graph is because, first of all, the identity system is kind of tied to who they really are.
Right. Like, I mean, you can always create like a pseudonym.
Sure.
But there was a guy, Clanker, the project, if you recall.
Yeah. I didn't know who that guy was until we knew so hey hey hey hey hey don't be bringing that up
yeah but i mean i think that that's that that's a kind of cool feature not a bug is that you know
you well first of all you you have this identity system that's built
in, that's part of the integration, but also you have this values alignment. So the people who are
on Firecaster choose to be there to be part of this experience, which is all of it right now is
a big experiment. Nothing is kind of complete or, you know, saying this is perfect. This works as
Dan, who is the co-founder of Firecaster always says like, you know, we this is perfect, this works, as Dan, who is the co-founder of Farcaster,
always says, like, you know, we're running all these experiments because, you know, at this
point, we don't know what Farcaster is. We're going to keep building it. All they know is that
they want to increase stately active users. But not to get too far from the point, it's that
integrated nature, I think, that makes it quite special. The other thing that I heard is there's these new behaviors that are
emerging on Forecaster. And I think it was, you know, Matthew, if not Matthew, it was you, Samuel,
who was mentioning Twitch and how on Twitch, people subscribe and there's these behaviors
that are already kind of like ingrained in people's
minds as to what it means to connect and interact with an individual there and what actions they can
take to be a part of that experience on farcaster there's some new experiences happening too every
day like you know the new collectibles feature which now you can mint stuff. But there's also this behavior that like,
hey, I'm trying this mini app.
It is almost a part of the culture
to help that developer improve that
based on my opinion or my desire
or my personal use of this experience.
I wonder if you all have any thoughts about that.
Yeah, there's two things to add on to it.
Yes, you get a lot of feedback,
but you have to be more ruthless in filtering
that feedback than you would have otherwise,
because people are generally in an optimistic state.
So you get feedback of, oh, this is great, this is great.
Oh, yes, we would love this.
You spend days building it out, you launch it, you try to monetize it, this is great. Oh, yes, we would love this. You spend days building it out.
You launch it.
You try to monetize it.
It falls flat.
That can happen everywhere and anywhere.
But on Farcaster, because people are more supportive,
just because that's the part of the community,
you have to check for that a little bit.
The other side on monetization is you can monetize really well
on transactions and transaction fees if you go outside of that.
Well, then it's rather unproven right now because you're seemingly more in the crypto user space than you are in the normal, regular, everyday Joe space
where they just swipe a credit card and don't even notice that you're taking 50 bucks every
month from them.
And that you have to buy us for a little bit.
Also in the ecosystem,
if you're talking to companies and developers,
most of them are also trying to figure it out.
So that bias is a little bit
of what you can do on a scale basis.
So it really depends on who you are,
which going back to this German pessimist thing
that I'm running with apparently in this space,
is like you have to balance for that a little bit.
Just use the feedback.
Just be mindful of where it's coming from.
Yeah, yeah.
That's, I think it's a general advice
for Castries Amplified
because you get a ton of that.
And you also feel the social crafter maybe
of people asking you to release that or fix that.
And so, of course, you need to be careful on who you're listening to, right?
And prioritize things accordingly.
But I think it's more of the pros than the cons for these.
It's a feature for me.
It's a feature to me.
I wonder if you, and maybe we'll go with you, Limone, first.
I wonder if you all can speak to onboarding on Farcaster,
specifically from the angle that we were talking about just now,
which is monetization. In traditional, I would say development,
kind of, yeah, traditional development,
it usually has some incentives
designed around attracting new users.
I mean, I remember when I was using PayPal a long time ago,
maybe even Venmo,
I was encouraged to recommend the app to friends.
And for every person that signed up,
I think I used to get like five bucks. Like it's not a small fee.
I used to get paid pretty well to turn people on to use the app.
And like that, I mean, there's hundreds of other platforms
that I've tried
that there are incentives built in to attract new users. What do incentives look like
when you're developing for Farcaster or the base app, right? And by the way, for anybody who's
listening, Farcaster as the protocol can
run across multiple clients, including Farcaster, the client, and the base app. So when I say
Farcaster, just assume I'm talking about all the clients that can support it. So yeah, when you're
building these mini apps on Farcaster, like what do the incentives look like to make it attractive for new users?
Are you incentivizing it at the,
more as a broadcast,
like, hey, sign up and go and use it?
Or are you creating these incentives
at the user, existing user level,
where it's like, hey, bring five more friends.
And for each friend that you bring on,
you're going to make, I don't know,
a buck for bringing people on. Like, what does that look like for you and we'll start with limone
i think that's plenty of incentives structure that you can build
knowing that you know everything is based on crypto rates financial rates that you can use
and so it's very easy to build incentives for people and sometimes
even bots or non-humans joining your mini-app just to farm those incentives. And I think
you need to be smart on how you do it because it might help you in the short term, you know,
attracting users, coming on a daily basis or incentivizing them in inviting new users to your mini app that's great.
But you need to be careful on how people and bots can farm these incentives again because if they start farming these incentives instead of
using or benefiting from the core feature of your mini app that you want to optimize for,
you might end up optimizing for features that actually are not that relevant,
but are just like the most used ones only because there's incentives for that
There's incentives for that and there's people willing to go for those incentives.
and there's people, you know, willing to go for those incentives.
And so getting back to the same topic around all the feedbacks that you get, part of the feedbacks that you get from the community and people using your mini app is metrics.
You can analyze and see how many people are clicking that button, how many people are taking that action.
How many people are clicking that button, how many people are taking that action.
And if you're not careful with how you play with incentives, you might end up optimizing
for something that is not really relevant, but it's just being used because
it's giving them incentives to do so. So it's always, you know, a balance.
It's always a balance, but there's a lot to play with that because again, we're in a social context
and so it's very easy to have these incentives like spreading around and build viral moments.
Actually, before we get to continue with that, because this is a great question,
I want to hear everybody's thoughts. There is something here and I'd be remiss if I didn't ask it because this is like ontology's
domain and I know this is something that they'd be interested to learn more about.
When we talk about incentives and farmers, like people who are, might not be aligned to the game
or the users that you'd like to see on your platforms or your games or anything that you're building, what is it that you're, does it matter? Like, okay, I guess let me ask that
question better. Sybil attacks have been around for a very long time. And I think when it comes
to incentives, people are more incentivized to attack a system and game it for their own gains, right?
And in this case, whatever monetary value it is that you're distributing.
Does it matter for many app builders to create some sort of like civil defense
for these types of incentives on their gains?
Or, I mean, is it such a small group of users that you're going to be
engaging with anyways that civil resistance isn't even something you're considering
if i can speak for farby like i can give you real examples of like facts that happens uh on farby On Farmville, we, I don't know, like months ago, we introduced a $60 weekly reward for the top players in the leaderboard.
So whether it was farming more experience points in the mini-app, at the end of the week, we'll get a split of a $60 prize pool.
price pool okay and then of course attracted the bots so not humans but
automated programs that were just attacking our farming experience points
automating you know actions and the end result was that like the top 50 every
week was always made of like bots and this is a problem if you know you have real players actually
playing the game greeting guard working guard and then ending up at the end of the week with
nothing right and so at some point we decided to introduce like cb resistance stuff or you know just filtering using
name or score but there's a bunch of you know like different credentials that you can check
um so that real players actually putting the work to you know play the game and enjoy it can actually hurt from it uh as i think it's it's an healthy incentive.
The thing with bots, I think it's not a big issue as long as you're also somehow getting value from them, right?
Because real users give value for us because they play the game, they enjoy it, they create the community,
they exchange, I don't know, they collaborate on stuff, while bots they just optimize for
that reward.
And so they are not, they are just extracting, that's the main thing.
So this is real facts that happened and And now if you check the leaderboard,
it should be fine, definitely.
Yeah, thank you for sharing that.
I mean, anybody else dealing with this in what they're building?
And how have you looked at Sybil Defense
in the platforms you're building, if at all?
It's really interesting for me
because we get that question from a lot of clients.
So the interesting question there is clients ask us
for how much shares did we get?
Like, because one of the biggest pitches I do
for any DTEK prospect usually is the social angle
and that tight integration,
because I think that's unique.
On top of just literally being in front of
where users are, what Limoni briefly laid out at the beginning.
And to me,
civil resistance is interesting there because usually you don't care about
usage and it depends.
Like Limoni isn't like,
it's literally usage dependent on every gamer,
so to say,
whereas a trading app,
they don't care if it's civil because they take a fee. So if there's a lot of symbols whereas a trading app, they don't care if it's Sybil because they take a fee.
So if there's a lot of Sybils in your trading app, you still make money. So that counts as a
user in that sense. For Farcassel, the protocol, they don't take a fee. It's mostly social,
so it should be valuable to mostly everyone on the network. So their Sybil becomes a personal
question of me as an individual,
when I look at my feed, it needs to be good. And that's why it's so hard for the network
itself and for the Merkley team building the Farkas rep and for base as well, to really
do like a good spam filter. That's why Twitter spam filter is hot. Some people generally
enjoy the adrop content and just literally every single piece being an ad about a new
adrop, because they're literally farming ad drops.
You can see that in their description.
If you take a video call with them, they're nice people. They just prefer making three bucks a day on an ad drop than working a sweatshop, right?
That's their situation.
And you may not like it, but it is what it is.
And civil resistance then for our clients usually comes in the sense of analytics where it's like, well, how many of these are high quality users?
And then you have to look and then they have to define criteria. That may mean certain kind of activity on chain. That could mean certain kind of follower counts.
Nailar has their score, OpenRank has their score.
The Farcaster team has a spam label set that they publish every now and then, usually weekly
on their GitHub.
So there's a bunch of data sources you can use.
We built a Dune growth chart, like a growth dashboard on Dune.
And when I built it, I asked OpenRank to give me like, what's a good score for Farcaster
users? that I asked OpenRank to give me like, what's a good score for far caster users. And even
for them, it was kind of hard to pick like a perfect, perfect score. And so they said,
well, take the current top 60,000 of our score because we roughly have looked at those and
know that that's the quality set that as the bar. And as the network grows, you just leave
that bar and we'll see if more people cross that or not.
So that's kind of the usage number we now use.
And in that Dune dashboard, you then see that half the volume of daily casts is actually considered spam by that open rank metric.
It's rather a long-winded explainer, but that's how we build those products.
And I hope you took something away from that.
No, absolutely.
I mean, by the way, this is our bread and butter with ontology.
It's like working on identity and reputation systems, credentialing, all of that in order
to like...
Give me a good metric on Dune and I'll just plug it into the dashboard.
Like the OpenRank stuff is like 60,000 addresses.
I just literally took the score hard-coded and I have to filter over every forecasted user,
which by now actually is a milgan in the dataset.
So all of my Dune queries are actually too big to run,
even with materialized views.
And since I'm not paying 500 bucks a month for Dune,
I had to scrap half of the dashboard.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I mean, I'll talk to you offline.
I definitely, this is very interesting to me,
this idea of like providing reputability or context in terms of like, reputability on these social networks. Just generally, I just got to give a bit of backdrop. I myself too, is building something on Farcaster.
something on Farcaster, gosh, it feels like almost two years, but probably not two years ago,
where we were trying to provide context data into people's activity, just generally based on
connections and transaction data. But it's hard. It's a huge lift. It's not easy at all. So I can
see why even when you're using these tools like Dune,
like that it can get expensive very fast. Cool. Well, going back, I do want to continue the
conversation on onboarding. And we were talking about incentives. I know we kind of took a fork
on the road there to talk about like civil resistance but when it talked anybody else have
any i mean maybe matthew for your game like what does incentives look like for your users like are
you leveraging that as an onboarding mechanism like or a retention tool i mean obviously you
can earn as you play but like what does that what kind of thinking goes into the design of that for
you yeah so there's a couple of different ways to look at it um i think when you talk about What kind of thinking goes into the design of that for you?
Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways to look at it.
I think when you talk about incentives, it's important to look at them.
So are the incentives for user acquisition or for user retention? Because they're two entirely different games and two entirely different ways that you play them.
So if we look at, like, for user acquisition uh fintech as an industry was literally
built on paid referrals paypal kicked it off they started off paying like literally a hundred dollars
per person then dropped it to 50 then dropped to 20 then dropped it to five uh we saw pretty similar
models with companies like revolution uh even circled behind usdc back when they had a consumer
app they were spending millions of dollars a month on these paid incentive
referrals.
And like the stickiness of those types of programs is not good,
but the numbers go the right direction for as long as you keep spending
money on them.
So if you're looking at incentives to grow your mini app and you're using
it just based off getting new people to press buttons that don't have any
value transfer
involved in that transaction,
then yeah, just whatever amount of money you put on that,
you're basically just lighting it on fire
to make the check go to the right.
And it will do exactly what you're looking for.
If that's meaningful or not is a different question.
And why you did that is another question.
But we are definitely excited about layering incentives.
So when we finally ship this next
iteration of clan come on um the entire thing is kind of incentives the whole way through
like every item in there is an item that you own uh every choice you make is a choice that you
decided to do every choice you make incurs a cost and bears an outcome whether those things are
positive or negative depending on what you're trying to do and how you're trying to do it and why you did that in the first place. Was it to
make a profit? Was it to level up Mon? Etc. So like the entire game is a big massive web of
incentives. But in terms of like retention and actually like more top level point at it and say
this is an incentive, we're're gonna move all of our referrals
from our database on chain.
So we can actually map all of the users.
And when users complete certain challenges
or meet different milestones,
we can make it very easy for the referrer
to get a share of the rewards in those cases,
which is kind of something we do with trivia already.
Trivia is basically HQ trivia brought back as a mini app.
It's basically HQ trivia at home.
It's kind of janky.
It breaks sometimes,
but a couple of hundred people
that show up every week and play it.
Shout out to NAMLICHPROF,
who's been hosting lately.
Absolutely smashing it.
But yeah, we give away like $300 of crypto
every Wednesday at the minute.
And if you refer somebody, you get 10% of that if they win.
So if I refer Sam and it's a German history quiz,
I might be in a good spot.
And if he wins 300, I walk away with 10 after it.
Or I walk away with 30 for 10 minutes of Sam's work.
So I think there are interesting ways
just to like bob and weave in referrals and incentives i do think going purely after user acquisition and blowing up money uh for
the sake of number or chart go to the right is kind of a dangerous game but it's one we're more
familiar with from airdroff and the likes how do you think about retention in that sense
so if i have you and you're a great player
in one of our games and you invite three friends,
we don't necessarily care too much
that you invited three friends.
We might give you something small for that.
But if they're reaching like level five, level 10,
if they're doing or are part of certain like
ephemeral qualitative events.
So if we do a special event on Thursday, the 28th of July,
and your friend was a part of that,
that's an important thing that we can kind of factor into that tree
and factor into how we manage the rewards.
I think Ponder is a phenomenal example of someone
that's doing this very well at the minute.
I think it becomes even more important
once your users have a financial contribution to some kind of multiplayer activity, multiplayer finance-based activity.
That's when I think you've got to be really cautious about where your incentives are coming from, what type of behavior you're incentivizing, and what type of consequences is it having on other players of the game.
For me, it's interesting because a lot of the money
in mini apps also is just free money, especially
in the OG crowd.
And even for newer people, they get on the rewards leaderboard
rather quickly.
They have $5.
And then Ponder is like $0.50.
And they also seed you with a buck or two.
Do you care about that when you take Signal into account
for retention?
Or is that just like, well, we just have people, they come back.
We measure retention in that sense.
I don't know.
It kind of depends.
Like I wouldn't be too worried about, I wouldn't take somebody doing something once and spending a small amount of money as a good thing.
I would take somebody doing something that's non-financial every day over somebody doing something slightly financial once a week um but it definitely is a strong signal i do think there is something about
the act of spending money in a way that you are happy with that builds trust between you and a
product so i do think slight monetization and slight ways for people to pay a little bit of
money for something is very important in games and can be an important
differentiator over time for mitigating bots but again in the short term and incentivize it's not
such a good metric to look at i think that's jeff behind the ontology icon what's up buddy
it is yeah i'm gonna try to talk with my failing voice. Sorry. Matthew, I'm just really interested in what you were saying there in terms of the use of referrals and so on.
And I wondered if you thought about the opportunities around things like sticky reputation, that persistent reputation.
So you can look at the referrals in one game and whether their referrals stuck around. Did they hang around? Did they stay there or did they just come in and disappear?
stuck around did they hang around did they stay there or did they just come in then disappear
because i'm just thinking that in this world of fast new mini apps that testing things that try
new things out new mini app comes out again that persistent reputation so you can say you know this
guy when he refers people they stay it's great to give him a referral and maybe even making it a
better referral and things like that is that something you've thought thought about or is it just too difficult to bring in?
No, for sure.
That's pretty much where we're thinking long-term.
I definitely agree with you
that there is an opportunity for someone
to crack open the mini app developer space
with some kind of like,
not so much like ad products or CRM products,
but some like new products specifically
for mini app builders that taps into this open data that's a readily available layer that's never been here before that Web2 companies would have never agreed to share with each other.
I think there's a huge opportunity for someone to crack that open and make it easier to plug into all that data and leverage all that data, especially for things like sticky reputation.
Like you said, there's like so much you could do there.
And there's a lot you could figure out today if you're willing to write some Dune queries
or write a couple of scripts and put in the time.
There's such valuable information you can find today.
But having a system that actually makes that actionable
could be a game changer.
Absolutely game changer.
I think the actual part you said is the game changer.
We have all of the data laying there.
Just nobody makes it actionable.
Exactly, exactly.
Like if you sign up for my game, Sam,
and you're like the Dom Dalla of fucking games on Firecaster.
And if you fucking post the game,
a hundred players sign up and 70 of those people stick around.
If you knew that, like that's, that's a so valuable.
Have you played around with the embed API by chance?
One thing that I'm excited about,
we're building that out as a showcase over the next weeks,
is you put in a category you care about, like gaming,
and you get the top few users recommended.
That may be interesting for people to then be like, hey,
here's the top 550 users in the gaming category. And then you can cross check that with the people in the finance category if
you're like, say, a tokenized game, and then you kind of get a mesh of who to reach.
Yeah, what is this? Did you say embedded here?
Embed, yeah, Yasin.
Oh, MBD.
Yeah, no, no, no, nope, nope, nope, nope. It's not called embed, sir.
Yeah, that's much better no, nope, nope, nope, nope. It's, uh, it's not called embed, sir. Yeah, that's Bushbanny.
That's Bushbanny.
I'm legally not allowed to say the, um, I don't know what you called it.
Embed.
MBD is what I've always known the best.
No, yes.
Yes, you've seen it.
It's quite particular about using the new name nowadays.
Yeah, I got you.
It makes sense.
No, it's good.
Check that out.
He says all the non-technical users already switched over and the dev just shortens it.
But they actually tried to get the acronym for the SDK, but somebody like three years
ago or even longer
just blocked it on NPM, hasn't done anything
in like NPM namespaces being blocked.
You can't do anything about it.
Yeah, you got that rare three digits NPM name.
Yeah, dude, like why is there no domain,
like crypto portal to buy NPM acronyms?
Like literally.
Somebody fix this, somebody fix this. Sounds like there's a lot of opportunities
for developers to get involved. At least I counted three things that y'all were mentioning
that needs to get built. Yeah, I think like if you want to rewatch the community talks
at Farcon, Limoni is really going well into retention and getting users since Favile is probably
the most retentative mini app out of all of them.
And then at the end, there's like a little slide that I had where I just list like five
to 10 dev things and APIs that you can just use to get data.
Yeah, if you have a link or a tweet that we can put on the bulletin board here.
I know it's a long time ago.
We could pin it.
If not, we'll share it later.
I know your Twitter game is better than mine.
So you may have.
I have it.
I have my talk.
Of course, I will post it below.
Please do. Either in the comments or on the bulletin board where's the where do i why is there no chat here
on live streams there is a chat on twitter yeah so you can hit the little plus button at the
bottom right and then you can basically live chat uh in this in this space or you could put it up on the bulletin board
by doing the little share button on the tweet,
and then the top one should be this space,
and you just pin it on the board.
Okay.
I'm just tweeting public in this space.
Can I recap all these spaces?
I don't know if you've noticed, but especially these on-chain gaming spaces,
this is the fourth and final one.
I've been recapping them, putting them on my newsletter,
which is news.cryptosapiens.xyz.
Any links to what we've been talking about here,
I'm going to go and dig them up.
If not, get into your DMs and ask for the talks.
And then I'm going to include them
because I think those are really valuable to include
because, yeah, absolutely,
they're all really talking about the problem space
that we're discussing here today.
Okay.
I tweeted about it, but I can't seem to do anything in this space.
I see Limones in this space.
I'm on web.
That may be a reason.
Skill issue.
Skill issue.
Apparently, Limones' Twitter game is stronger than yours.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's. Can can see both of my links
i i see the youtube yeah i see the other one too the the building viral many apps yeah by the way
if if you're listening to this definitely go and check out this um this link that limone just shared in this thread. That is an article that he wrote not too long ago.
It feels like maybe less than three months ago, right?
Yeah, it was a little before, one month before Park.
I think it was April.
I mean, we can check just by opening the article.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the point is, yeah, the point is you wrote this,
and it's actually quite comprehensive
in terms of, like, understanding how to build mini apps on Farcaster,
which I think it's a useful thing to understand,
even if you're a user, to see how that works.
And I definitely used it as a reference for myself
as I was developing the outline for this conversation today.
But yeah, as we've reached the top of the hour, I want to make sure I give an opportunity to each
one of you to kind of share kind of a vision for the next six months, because I think not just,
you know, the on-chain space, but also Forecaster is evolving so quickly, it's hard to project a year or more.
But what are some of the things that you're excited about
or are most eager to see happen on Farcaster as a mini-app developer?
And we'll go start with Limone and keep going to my right.
Yeah, I think like touching on something that I mentioned in the beginning, I'm excited
Yeah, I think like touching on something that I mentioned in the beginning,
to see how many users and how long it will take for base to hopefully onboard, you know,
met new users that are not cryptinated and building apps that they can enjoy. So knowing that on forecast as far we
always had, we knew that we had a cryptonitive audience and so some
assumptions or technical complexities maybe we didn't spend much time on
abstracting them. Well now I'm excited to see how a new wave of mini apps will hopefully be more accessible for normies.
Awesome. Thank you. Samuel, or Sam, excuse me. What are some of the things that you're seeing
in the next six months that you'd like to see? One, you're asking for revision for Farcaster
for the next six months. If anyone can to see? One, you're asking for a vision for Farcaster for the next six months.
If anyone can give you that, please forward it to me.
I generally think...
Well, no, what do you want to see?
Based on what you've seen the evolution of it becoming,
like what are some of the things that are missing
that you'd like to see too?
What I want to see is just people doing more
with everything coming together.
Meaning, read the blog post Limoni comment,
I added a few sources, take
everything in you can build, put it up on a whiteboard and then start to make connections.
We actually filmed like a one week video course where I just went into all of that. And when I
did that, I realized, oh, shit, there's like freaking so much data, which is why I highlighted,
we have to somehow make it actionable. One thing I'm currently exploring is if you have a set of FIDs,
like usernames, as your mini-app users,
how can you scale that into the next cohort?
How can you literally use all of that open data to predict
who would be a good new user to talk to and onboard,
so that you actually don't just cold DM a bunch of people,
you actually kind of warn DM because you already know know the guy they've posted for like however long um and i think using that
and going more into that social data angle as an app developer is really cool and otherwise just
dude abuse the heck out of wallets like literally abuse the heck out of wallets and and matthew is
the best guy to do that well matthew the mic goes to you. What's what are some of the things that you're projecting and would like to see in the next six months? And, you know, how are you leveraging wallets as Sam said?
Yeah, man, Clankamon, Clankamon, Clankamon, Clankamon. Probably some more Clankamon on top of that as well. Yeah, I'm actually super excited to get this out. Backstory on Clankermon, Clankermon, and probably some more Clankermon on top of that as well.
Yeah, I'm actually super excited to get this out.
Backstory on Clankermon, brief and sweet.
We started off as one of the 80-year mini apps.
We were more focused on trading with a little bit of gaming tied in there.
And yeah, we spent pretty much the last six months rebuilding it from the ground up as a totally on-chain where trading is something you can do it's not that important anymore um and yeah just really uh aggy to get
it out into the world and live i think generally i'm more broadly excited by on chain entertainment
as a category right now i think if you take crypto you take open social which firecaster is currently winning in in the
sections of the industry that matter to someone like us um and ai i think when you take those
three you've just got the most interesting brewing pot of entertainment uh you've ever seen before
so i'm just very excited to see all of those three things continue to kind of mix and
create interesting things and hopefully uh can i come on with a few other things that we do where
open that bracket of interesting things
awesome well it's been a pleasure honestly i think this is the first time i've uh chatted with all of
you together this way uh lamona and matthew and sam appreciate you coming up. And my co-conspirator, Jeff, who's under the weather, I appreciate you stepping up and opening the space.
You definitely, for people who are listening or might listen to the, what is it called, the recording of this,
if you want to follow up on it, even get more context afterwards,
check out the recap that should be out on Monday on news.cryptosapiens.xyz
where I'm publishing all of the updates
or recaps, should I say, from these conversations.
But I appreciate all of you, you know,
spending an hour of your day with me talking about this.
I know that this is super special to many of us,
you know, and definitely kind of putting a pin on, you know, for onboarding
and on-chain gaming, which I think was really cool to see this come full circle, not just
as a, you know, social grasp as a distribution mechanism, but as an onboarding retention
layer for games and just experiences at large.
So thank you so much, and I look forward
to catching up with you all on Farcaster.
Thank you again for the invitation.
And it's been a pleasure.
Matthew, Samuel, keep building.
Awesome.
Cheers, everybody.
Ciao.
Bye bye. Ciao. Bye-bye.
