James Baldwin critique of Everybody's Favorite Protest Novel: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (medieval morality) and Richard Wright's Native Son (never transcended his environment of fear and bigotry). He wrote Go Tell It On the Mountain.
I promise you this will be prrr: petty, raw, repetitive, risky
three parts:
- why did he leave redux
- a brief About
- a series on my 37 most liked accounts (follow me on RSS)
Read on, anon!
Why Did He Leave (Redux)
I left Farcaster in August 2024, wrote a 6-minute-read blog post about it. I returned to launch SassyHash 💅 as an antidote to some of the ills I wish I had agency over -- spooky LLM-driven surveillance, some utility for channels (aka FIP-2) and space for "cozy corners"; and as a playground for Mini Apps (nee Frames v2) and alternate rewards algorithms. I've also built picosub for the 🎩 Degen community, after downshift shut down microsub. And 🐟 Snappa, a self-sovereign way to interact with Snapchain for the new world of Warpcast (to be re-branded as the Farcaster client) co-existing with Coinbase Wallet and Zapper clients.
SassyHash 💅 was "the change I want to see" to improve a small corner of the experience. It languished for 4 months of dev purgatory, until after woj's hire when the technical blocker got removed inside the Warpcast servers. It is what it is. I had a go at making it work, buying two channels and paying out hundreds of dollars in rewards, across a wide spectrum of global users. But Composer Actions are clearly the past (and maybe the future) of Mini Apps, not the present.
Nine months have passed. We are through the midpoint of "choo-choo" bull-market (ETH 2.5k!) wartime co-founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. Which means executing on best-ideas in Notion docs titled "Open in case of Bull Market"; an all-hands-on-deck approach including hiring Ted (not Lasso) and slokh, acquihires of Supercast (woj) and Comm (ashoat); and the DAU growth push epitomized by "come get paid on Farcaster" spearheaded by the Warpcast Rewards Leaderboard.
I envisioned at the start of Mini Apps that there could be an outcome like the WordPress ecosystem, with AI-assisted lightweight developers earning an income for providing valuable services. I tried building One Hundred Push Up Club, joined some newcomer support groups, built 3 unique and different Mini App starter templates (lite, medium, and heavy). There are enough starters across a gamut of target users; the limitating factor is not a lack of useful dev education and tooling.
So in May 2025, the weight of these 6 minor things combined and I'm done trying. The big things of course are the gatekeeping of Farcon NY, and the revelation of Clanker project co-founder Proxy Studio's scam-filled past. But there's plenty of petty too!!!
a brief About
1/ anti-chinese racism
this is standard micro-aggression, we begrudgingly accept your presence but want you to know we are not allies, American style racism.
I still believe most Americans don't think or feel this way. But some definitely do, like Ryan Selkis at one extreme of blatant demagoguery, and Dan Romero at the opposite extreme of Why I never! feigned outrage smirking. I'll just remind you that, if you are an anime artist he thinks your craft is about waifus, and if you have a clearly Thai name he might misidentify you as Chinese. And yeah, when you see Chinese in SF think 舊金山 maddafackas.
If you're gonna be Jackie Robinson, you gotta be faster stronger more talented than everyone, and more mentally tough. If you're gonna be Robert Parish or Cedric Maxwell or even Bill Russell, you gotta suck up the racism from your own fans in order to be part of the dynasty. Fuck that, it's 2025 and this is the internet and this is Farpcaster.
2/ no shadow bans b/c public; fred wilson farcon 2 fireside chat
all gas
3/ yoinked miniapp account. warplet auto-sold my degen to pay for what. ...
The Warplet just took people's money, sorry we had to. Wait no, actually it was out of an abundance of caution
4/ ted saying no way to make money (can't remember the come get paid messaging)
airdrops scraping bottom of barrel with testnet tokens. imajin signing up for Amex Black and getting Capital One points. And all the eager idiots so, so eager to tell everyone to "hold"
5/ kasra saying getting paid doesn't work, yet is a someone-build fave
dude is a killer along lines of levelsio not a fly-by-night low-effort vibe coder
6/ thigh rubbing before launch
I don't really care about dogs accounts eating our lunch and crowd funding e-beggar tech. this all solves itself without the need for a central Guiding Hand.
notes for my 37 endpoint
technical algo description
shock of shocks
s/o zoo alex fairy godmother 70 neynar score
experiment: what does a 37 account following feed look like, vs a home feed vs a following feed with 3k+ of infovore thiccness? as interesting or nah
blockhead's take with which i strongly disagree:
- ted's instinctive tone policing response
- my goat story response (couldn't trend) see, the craft was saying pp rather than penis
minutiaie that rewards with nuggets of coffee spit-takes
final take is zoo vs zoz
dummie, burrr moxie feud
mleejr and mattlee
mvr m-j-r mjc716
no ted or linda? neither of them followed me until just before they joined Merkle. lesson-in-there
