The [New] Consumer User Conference

Last week, over 1,000 people convened in NYC for FarCon, a user conference dedicated to the onchain social protocol, Farcaster. Today I thought I'd share some reflections as a consumer, as a user, and also, as a builder.

I've been working alongside crypto-native teams since 2021. While I've attended many developer-centric conferences like ETHGlobal, DevCon, and DevConnect, what I like about FarCon is that it felt like the first true consumer user conference in the crypto space. It convenes people for their ideas, their builder energy, and for community.

What is Farcaster?

In case you're unfamiliar with the platform, Farcaster is hoping to take back the Internet, so to speak, with an alternative to the social media narrative that's largely polluted the way many of us think about consumer social. Users today know that what we've been doing is not working. People are leaving platforms, joining new ones, or moving offline entirely.

Personally speaking, there's no longer a single-shot place where I can post information that my entire personal or professional network can consumer. Which is why I spend nearly as much energy distributing my own content onto so many platforms as I do writing the original drafts to begin with. A massive time suck.

Rather than design a system that's ads-driven, Farcaster is not a locked down data mine of user information; it's an open protocol that anyone can build on top of. Their goal is to build the crypto-native social network. It's a little too early to know where, exactly, social networks are headed. But one thing is clear: The average user is unhappy with the current options, and the fragmentation has begun.

To the uninitiated, Farcaster likely still feels pretty cluttered or confusing. There's a lot of talk about tokens, minting new-age NFTs, and wallet payments through a variety of micro-apps and mini-apps on the network. (It's all a little meta.) But there's also new-age discussion groups, too, called Channels, that sit somewhere between a Reddit comments section and your favorite WhatsApp group.

For instance, I'm the owner of the gardening channel and help curate conversations; I also engage on several other non-crypto channels, such as parenting, vibe-coding and new-york. Through these channel discussions, you connect with other users (often without even fully knowing their names or what they look like). In that way, it really does bring you back to the old school Internet days.

Motivating The Will to Build

The trending conversation at FarCon this year was all about MiniApps, which are embeddable applications that you interact with in the Farcaster feed itself. Think: One-shot interactions like fortune teller apps, quizzes, arcade or lottery style games, or even social posting functions like check-in's. But you can build more complicated stuff as well. (One team is recreating Farmville on Farcaster; they call it Farville.)

Last year's FarCon inspired me to install a text editor and set up a developer environment on my laptop for the very first time. I set out to make a Farcaster frame to empower a project I was collaborating with at the time. In the end, I didn't end up getting there. It was too deep, too fast. And it was (still) too complicated for me.

This year's FarCon inspired me to make my own MiniApp. So this weekend I sat down with my AIs and a bunch of documentation (curated by Farcaster user @weeb3dev, thank you!) to build my own.

Spoiler alert: I (still) didn't cross the finish line, but I got to the point of having a broken prototype deployed locally. Which is a hell of a lot further than I got last year.

The MiniApp Moment is reminiscent of something I've been hearing a lot about in consumer social right now: Short, bursty, quick-hit builds. Things like WebSim, Ohara, and even a new ilk of businesses circling around iMessage apps are leaning into this. But now, for the first time, us "vibe-coding" builders can lean into it too. Thanks to AI-enabled documentation and no-code tools, it's easier than ever to just get started. And even while I'm not actively building an onchain social app right now, it felt really natural to apply my recent no-code builder skills into a new deployment environment, one that is ripe with community support and fellow builders, all doing the thing at the cutting edge.

For anyone building (and breaking) with AI-powered apps, I encourage you to try to build something with a new tool or workflow every single week.This is a standard I've been holding myself to for many months. So maybe this week, that thing could be building a Farcaster MiniApp. After all, the micro-build moment is upon us.