Toady Hawk
There has been a lot of hullaballoo recently around Farcaster allegedly lacking "interesting content." This all stemmed from a cast by FC founder Dan Romero that was mostly taken out of context, in my opinion. When pressed about why his app wasn't growing faster, he replied "Not enough interesting content."
For what it's worth, I think this is a perfectly fine and honest thing for the founder of a social network protocol to say, and it fits perfectly with his constant contention that he considers Farcaster to be "default dead" until and if it successfully scales. This "interesting" comment, as I took it, was just another observation on the difficulty of scaling anything, really. He's not saying "everyone here sucks", he's saying "if we want growth, we need many more interesting people creating a lot more interesting content." Of course we do!
However, some took this opportunity to self-flagellate and wax poetic about how everyone who was early on Farcaster was basically just lucky and doesn't bring anything interesting to the table. Good engagement-bait perhaps, but ultimately very far from the truth in my experience. I have met so many smart, ambitious, quirky and kind people on this app, and while I agree with Dan that we still need many, many more... blanket dismissing the people that made this app special in the first place is not the wei.
And so, to try and help in some small fashion, I've decided to attempt to shine a light on some of the people whose content and company I have found the most valuable in my time here by posting a short daily spotlight, every day, on one person that I believe is worthy of the title "Farcaster VIP (Very Interesting Person)."
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There is perhaps no better person to start this series with than Mr. Purple himself -- Chris Carella (@ccarella.eth.) With an FID of 472, you know this guy has been on Farcaster long before it was cool. In fact, he was so early here and loved it so much that he helped to found a nounish DAO all about supporting Farcaster builders; /purple DAO, which has raised over 100 ETH from daily auctions to fund all kinds of contributors to the protocol. In fact, alongside Octant, they are rewarding Farcaster-native builders with 10 ETH right now via Rounds.wtf in the /purple channel.
Chris is a great person to follow here because he is a very kind and genuine soul, and he is always cooking up something new and interesting. He believes strongly in enabling permissionless building, upholding Ethereum-first principles, and supporting builders and creators whenever he can. He is one of the most positive sum thinkers I've met, and it's very refreshing.
Chris has been an active and engaged participant in /nouns (where we met) and he's always contributing his voice in governance and helping new people get involved in the community. (He was even awarded a Noun for his contributions.)
He also founded a collective called /energy, all about supporting artists in the Zora ecosystem. And speaking of artists, Chris is a very talented one in his own right. Check out his Zora profile for a taste of his creative output.
Even at his day job with Charmverse, he has constantly been a source of edification for builders in this space, keeping them up to date on available grants from across all onchain ecosystems and even partnering with Optimism to deploy a bespoke site for the SUNNYs Award Show applications recently. The latter initiative was a blending of worlds for Chris, who is also an Optimism Badgeholder and has volunteered countless hours to help adjudicate previous rounds of Retro PGF.
Most recently, Chris has taken on a new challenge with his Charmverse colleagues, launching a new app today called "Scout Game", which aims to gamify the discovery and proliferation of open source software.
If you want to learn more about Chris directly from the source, he was one of the earliest guests on my CC0 video podcast Zero Rights Reserved, or ZEROPOD for short, and if you haven't seen that interview, it's definitely worth a watch. You can view and collect it for free on Zora here.
Follow Chris on Farcaster @ccarella.eth if you like learning and hearing about: art, open source software, grants programs, optimism, nouns, and more.
-TH
Over 300 subscribers
Chris is the GOAT.
great start ! ⌐◨-◨ Farcaster VIPs, Day One: Chris Carella
Honored that @toadyhawk.eth would write about me first. There are so many great people on Farcaster. I'm looking forward to this series. https://paragraph.xyz/@toadyhawk/vip-1-ccarella
Cool and all but had to laugh at the idea of “farcaster VIPs” Couldn’t put any other protocol in there and not sound ridiculous “This guy is an email VIP” lol
Subscribed I’m looking forward to more!
Well deserved if you ask me, everyone’s got their time and this is yours lol
Is it done yet?
Ok, here goes nothing... VIPs (Very Interesting People) of Farcaster, Day One: Chris Carella @ccarella.eth, live now on @paragraph. Please read, give feedback, mint for free and share if you'd like me to continue this series. 💛 https://paragraph.xyz/@toadyhawk/vip-1-ccarella
Mentioned in today’s feature: @dwr.eth @ccarella.eth /purple @vpabundance.eth @octant @rounds @charmverse /nouns @zora /energy @binji.eth @optimism /thesuperchain
🙏 🙏
Thank you Toady. Incredibly honored to be the first. So many good people to highlight imo.
Love this so much Toady, what a great way to kick things off. I have a feeling my follower list is gonna start growing as this series goes on. 500 $degen
💛 I may soon regret committing to doing this daily but I appreciate the love 😂
yeah daily feels like a lot. maybe give yourself some breathing room.
Gg 1000 $DEGEN
Love this 🤘 I appreciate your POV and really dig hearing insights about a VIP!
great idea. great execution. 👊
Awesome idea for a series and perfect inaugural VIP 💜
Interesting how long this has been discussed. What is the “intent” behind dwrs comment? I’m curious.
Like I said in the article, it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for @dwr.eth to say — of course we need more interesting content to grow the network 10x, 100x etc. Doesn’t mean he thinks everyone already here is uninteresting. After all, he mostly curated the earliest groups of users here himself. It was mostly other people who took that comment and ran with it, trying to make it seem like warpcqst is full of boring people, and that’s what prompted me to start this series.
Understood. When all is said and done people are going to think that people are interesting based on their experiences and I would be more curious to see what he’s thinking. That said, I get the series, and think it’s pretty cool .
I love this idea for a series @toadyhawk.eth - Keep this going! Its also perfect for newer folks to the platform and acts like a condensed resume/profile of each VIP.
Awesome, I’ll read it today 🫡