Recommendations, or not

The Socials

A little more than a year ago I wrote about the end of social media. I think a lot of what I wrote there holds true and is more obvious from this perspective, especially if you consider the trajectory X/witter is on. Regardless of how you personally feel about Musk or any of his choices (like removing block functions and unbanning abusers) the fact that he’s moved from apolitical to heavily pushing one side, and will have a role with the incoming government, it’s fair to consider things objectively. If the US government set up a social media app today I don’t know that many people would be rushing towards it, nor would they trust it to be open, fair, objective, or secure. Well rando normies might but most people I interact with online spend a few minutes thinking about privacy and security and take that into account at least somewhat. I think it’s probably reasonable to hold X to the same standard, which I also imagine for a lot of people it now fails.

For the moment I’m still there, though I cancelled my pro+ check mark thing a while ago (yet still seem to have the perks) and admit it’s mostly nostalgia and cryptotwitter keeping me engaged, but for how much longer I can’t say. I have been revisiting some of the newer decentralized options I’ve talked about in the past, and making a more concerted effort to spend time elsewhere. Truthfully, a future where I never even think about social media gets more appealing everyday, but without it I don’t know how to communicate or stay in touch with anything but a very small group of people, and everyday the thought of consolidating to only that gets more appealing, but for now I still need to work and let people know what I’m doing, so I’m still in the game.

Given that, I thought I’d share a bit what I’m playing with and how, for anyone that wants to follow along.

My one big realization is that there’s no way for me to be 100% engaged in every app all the time, so while for much of the last almost 20 years Twitter has been my primary goto, I’m actively trying to shift primary to Bluesky. The addition of account switching was big, and the recent launch of deck.blue will make anyone who still misses the golden age of Tweetdeck feel warm and cozy. I also really like being able to use my own domain as my username which serves as verification that I am who I say I am.

For a while now Bluesky and Warpcast were my kind of alternating 2nd and 3rd place though I’d admittedly sometimes go days or weeks without looking at them. At one point they were both very much Twitter clones with a dash of their own flavor, and while they’ve both grown a lot since then and there’s lots of factors and issues to consider, the big thing for me is that anytime I went back to Bluesky it felt immediately familiar where as every time I’d go to Warpcast I’d feel lost and like I was starting over from scratch. I don’t understand the recent change with channels and while I’m sure if I set aside a few hours I could get up to speed I’m just not motivated to do that, because I feel like I might have to do the same thing next month to get up to speed on whatever the next major change is. It also feels like it’s getting kind of hostile in ways I just don’t have time to worry about. So while I have the account there I’m admittedly not paying much attention. This is feeling kind of similar to Mastodon for me at this point, I’m there but I never go there.

I very occasionally look at Nostr and when I do I use Nos or Damus on iOS. The web interfaces I used before don’t seem to be working anymore and I haven’t bothered to look into why or what else might be a better option because it still feels very heavy inside baseball bitcoin land there, which is fine, just not my vibe. I don’t even know how to link my profile, so yeah.

I’m using native apps, but also enjoying some of the 3rd party options taking advantage of the open protocols to allow interacting with several different accounts in one place. On iOS I just set up Openvibe to sync Bluesky, Nostr, and Mastodon – so with that I might be passively engaging more with Nostr and Mastodon than I had been in the past. It sounds like Micro.blog does that too, and also syncs with other places like Medium, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Threads and others which I was initially intrigued by but while you can set up a free account to read a combined timeline you have to pay to post anything which was too much friction for me at the time. I’m not opposed to paying for apps at all, don’t get me wrong – I pay for a lot of apps, but no free trial + similar functionality that I have elsewhere + short attention span worked against it here. I may revisit later but I think Openvibe sort of covers the bases.

I’m not on Threads because Facebook, though recently I was wondering if I was being too much of a hardass about that so I asked on some of my feeds if I should try it out, and the admittedly biased group of people who bothered to respond to me were split at about 10% enjoying it and saying I should join, and 90% saying it’s just another algo driven feed by a major company pushing things I may or may not want to see and same drama as elsewhere so I think I’m still avoiding it for now.

This is all largely text focused, for images it’s a whole other collection of fun.

I’m still using Instagram, which yes I know Facebook, but I was there before and just never left, though haven’t converted to any of the meta/facebook/whatever stuff they have brought in which probably hurts me but the dumb thing is that in order to file a DMCA report with Facebook for something on IG – something I need to do from time to time – you need to have an IG account. So, yeah.

Sunlit is apparently a very nice Instagram clone/replacement made by the Micro.blog team, but when I tried to look at it I needed a MB login for it which I didn’t have at the time so still haven’t checked it out, but others seem to like it. Popset, Rodeo and Perma are also interesting next-gen photo/image blogging apps (Rodeo being more art focused) which have the bonus of being on-chain though that aspect is obfuscated for the most part, so onboarding is easy and if you don’t want to think about web3 stuff you don’t have to, but if you want to take advantage of it there it is.

I think we’ll see more and more of that in the future so it makes sense to have that foundation in place on new things being built.

For chat I spent a lot of time with Telegram these days, and Signal being a close second. Admittedly I’m not on Discord as much as I once was and can’t remember the last time I opened Slack. It’s for this reason that Beeper has my attention. I haven’t gone through the paces with it yet, but it looks to be a chat aggregator similar to Openvibe but for Signal and Telegram and Instagram and Slack and Discord and LinkedIn and Facebook and WhatsApp and several others so that might be a great option for people struggling to juggle between all of those places.

One final thing I’ll leave you with that I also have only lightly scratched the surface on is Delta Chat. Despite it’s name, it’s not a chat app – though maybe it kind of is? It’s actually an email client but it’s not like any email client you’ve ever seen because the UI is 100% chat focused. Gone are subjects, addresses, CCs, etc – all the things you think of with email. It really breaks your brain if you add your main business email address to it, however if you have a secondary address that you just use for friends and family and mainly just talking (vs sharing big files or something) it might be interesting to play with. I’ll dive into email more later, some other time.

That’s all for the moment, see you out in the ether…

BOOKS & PUNKS

As many already know the book CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM that I worked on most of last year, which is being published by Phaidon, is currently at the printers. As far as I know it should be in people’s hands in early December. I may or may not have seen a copy already, and in either case I can attest that it turned out beautifully. This thing is a brick, at over 800 pages it truly is an epic piece of work. It’s substantial in every way. Beyond just a catalog of all 10,000 CryptoPunks, it’s filled with thought provoking essays and insightful commentary. Interviews and assessments. And it’s put together in such a way that you can pick it up, flip to a random section and spend a few minutes reading and walk away feeling like you gained something from it. It’s not a cover to cover read, but a collection of powerful stand alone work. I’m deeply honored to have played a role in helping shape this from idea to final thing, and will be proud to have it on my shelf, and delighted when I see it on others.

Which is inevitable due it’s size and color. I mean, look at this thing:

You might think being this thick, it’s 100% all encompassing. In our initial talks that’s certainly something we aspired to. The end all be all, totally comprehensive book on CryptoPunks. And in many ways it is, but also–it isn’t. As we got into it we realized how this is a living thing, changing day to day with new stories being written and old stories being revised. While working on it we kept having to change something because something else happened, a big sale, new information uncovered, etc. At some point we had to say “this is the cut off point” otherwise it never would have been sent to the printer.

I also concede that there’s a level of information many people will find interesting and then another level that only the super nerdy dorks like myself even care about. Where possible, this book sticks to the things that are most interesting to the most people. Don’t get me wrong, it goes deep. But not too deep, if you know what I mean. And I think it’s stronger for that. I’d be remiss if I didn’t send a massive thank you shout out to Stone at Yuga Labs and Belle at Zak Group who were my constant and often daily contacts obsessing over this thing as much if not more than I was.

That said, I am a super nerdy dork and I admittedly go too deep all the time, as any number of blog posts here can illustrate. Which brings me to the next point – I realized that I regularly find myself sending people links to things I’ve written on the subject, or hear from someone that they read one of my older pieces and that sent them of on a search of their own. There’s also been a few interesting things that have happened since our self imposed cut off date. So I decided I might as well go ahead and pull all that together, update old things, document and explain some new things, and put out an unofficial companion to CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM. I floated the idea to a few people and the response was an overwhelming yes, so that’s what I’m going to do. So I present: PUNKS NOT DED.

This one is not for everybody, but it’s definitely for some people. I’m pulling things together and deciding what new to include right now but thinking this is going to come in between 60-100 pages. I’m matching height dimensions as best I can so it’ll look nice on the shelf next to it’s larger sibling. Full contents forthcoming but this will include previous blog posts, expanded wiki articles, some updated and expanded history as well as some new events. Depending on how it works out I might dive into some closely related derivatives a bit more too, as part of the larger conversation, but that’ll kind of depend the page count I land on and what I need to fill it. I’m thinking there will be a few different versions of this.

In the meantime, if you haven’t ordered CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM yet make sure you do so you get the first shipment. It’s available from Phaidon as well as on Amazon and everywhere else near you. I can’t wait for everyone to get this thing in their hands, it’s just worth it.

Personal Uniform Update 2024

A few inquiries lately so figured it was time for a check in / update. As I’ve noted in pervious years – where I am, specifically the weather where I am, has a shaping influence on the basic set up. I’ve been living in Vancouver now for going on 4 years which is much cooler climate wise than Tokyo and that’s reflected in the modifications I’ve made since then – though if you read my last update this one is probably predictable.

Socks – I’m about 50/50 between Stance cotton socks and Darn Tough wool socks. You’ll recall that one of the things I loved about Darn Tough was their 100% guaranteed no questions asked replacement policy which essentially means you buy them once and then for the rest of your life if your socks wear out you can replace them for free. One of the things I’ve learned about Canada since living here is that there’s a bunch of exceptions for everything. I’ve been told a lot of this is due to panic that foreign companies were going to come in and take over the market, so there’s a bunch of laws and policies requiring business goes through Canadian companies which has led to some obnoxious monopolies and a bunch of “exceptions” to policies that apply globally, but not in Canada. Darn Toughs policy is one of those. So rather than just sending them in and them sending you new ones, you have to send them to their Canadian distributor with a note explaining what went wrong and why and they will then decide if they replace them or not. In the last 4 years I’ve sent in 4 pairs of socks, one was rejected because I didn’t buy the socks in Canada, one was approved but it took 3 months to get the replacements, and two other pairs just disappeared, and Darn Tough hasn’t responded to any of my inquiries about them. So if the goal was to make the policy too painful for anyone to take advantage of, consider that a success. As a result I’ve been getting Stance socks instead, which are very comfortable but not really as durable so I just know I’ll have to buy replacements next year.

Underwear – David Archy Bamboo Boxer Briefs. Bamboo is such a great fabric for underwear, so comfortable and more sustainable than whatever synthetic blends most “tech fabrics” are made of.

T-shirts – Reigning Champ mid weight standard. These are great and I prefer them over everything right now. One of the selling points of wool shirts was “wear them for several days without worrying about washing them” and while cotton isn’t as forgiving, these are solid enough that they can easily be worn 2 days in a row without any concern at all. I really like this cloth weight and build quality. If I could get this exact same thing in Bamboo rather than cotton it would be my dream come true, but so far Bamboo seems to always be much thinner and not as structurally rigid. I hate thin t-shirts and that ended up being part of the deal killer with the Outlier wool shirts, they were either so super thin that I felt like my nipples were going to rip through them or so thick that they couldn’t be worn anytime outside of the dead of winter and took days to hang dry after washing. Also the ethical trade off was no bueno.

Pants – Still on my Iron Heart Japan jeans kick. I’ve got 4 pair of various weights, 14oz, 18oz and 24oz. Iron Heart repairs these for free in Japan too, so as they’ve worn over the years I coordinate dropping them off when I’m in Tokyo and they mend them in a way that seems unheard of outside of Japan. They don’t just slap on a patch, they re-thread seams and darn the denim so when I get them back it’s like thy never had a hole or rip. It’s incredible. I hunted all over Canada to find anyone doing repairs like this, and no one even comes close. The Russian seamstress at the tailor down the street from me almost ripped my head off for asking if they could repair without a patch. I prefer black pants, the 24oz ones only come in blue. So I attempted to dye them at home with some RIT dye which was kind of successful? For a few months anyway, then it kind of washed out and was a bit messy in the process. That said, I do like the black so I’ll probably dye them again.

Most of the time I’ll add a crew neck sweatshirt or sweater because I’m running a bit cold these days and prefer long sleeves. If it’s hotter I’ll swap to light hoodie or track jacket zip up thing.

Shoes – I realized the toe box on some of my smaller profile “skate” shoes were cramping my toes and starting to hurt, so I’ve switched back to Adidas shell toes almost entirely and with their new official vegan versions I don’t have to hunt for all synthetic models as hard as I used to. The big toe area is much more comfortable and they are fairly water resistant too which is good here where it rains so much. I have some Gore-Tex Adidas cross/hike shoes that I’ll use if we’re going out into the woods, but I don’t love them so not going to specifically recommend.

Decentralizing Social Media

From the very beginning of the internet we’ve wanted to talk to our friends. Or to talk to people who might become our friends. At first this was easy because there weren’t many people online so you could know everyone who found their way into an IRC channel or MUD or various other chatroom but as more people got online staying in touch with your friends became harder and it wasn’t long before our online social networks evolved into and were enabled by social networking sites (SNS). In my memory this starts with SixDegrees, for others it might be Friendster, Xing, MySpace or any number of other sites where you could subdivide everyone into a smaller group of people you wanted to connect directly with long before most of the world found their way onto Facebook. And everyone who has every used one of these sites has faced the same dilemma – leaving.

Not that it’s hard to walk away from any particular site but it is hard to walk away from the friends you made there, and in a very real way this became one of the tools used by these sites to keep you there. If you leave the site you are leaving your friends and you wouldn’t want to do that right? They used guilt along with various technical lock ins to make it very hard for you to recreate your social network on some other site. You might think of these people as friends but these sites look at your friends as valuable proprietary data. Of course this isn’t a good thing, they actually are your friends after all, but business models as they are with these sites want you to think you only have friends because they allow you to. So almost since there were social networking sites people have been trying to find ways to export their list of friends (or their social graph if you want to get fancy) and bring it into another site.

But just getting the information isn’t enough, if your friends aren’t using a new site then trying to connect with them there is going to be hard even if you somehow were able to bring over your friend list from another site. This is a problem with centralization, you need people to go to the specific place. There’s other privacy invasive options like uploading your entire address book but maybe you don’t want to show this company everyone you know, or maybe you don’t want to leak your friends private info, or maybe just because someone is in your address book doesn’t mean you want to connect with them on every social media site. Are they actually your friends or work colleague or ex-roommate or a million other potential classifications that makes this problematic? Anyway, this isn’t a new problem and smart people have been trying to solve it for a long time.

I first remember Ryan King talking about it in 2005 though he even notes then that this was a frequent conversation at the time. We were in the beginning of Web 2.0 but already imagining what Web 3.0 might be, and calling it The Semantic Web. (This is not to be confused with Web3 – the distinction between Web3 and Web 3.0 is still lost on a lot of people, and sadly a lot of the people who dreamed about Web 3.0 are missing Web3 because if silly biases, but that’s a different story for another time). Projects and proposals like Microformats and IndieWeb imagined an internet where an individuals personal data was owned by and controlled by themselves rather than by for profit companies. Rather than a website allowing you to see who your friends are you could choose to allow a website to see your friends. It was a revolutionary idea at the time, as Ryan notes, and unfortunately it didn’t catch on in the scale that any of us hoped it would. And as a result of that lack of adoption my Twitter feed right now is full of friends worrying about how they will stay in touch with each other if Twitter suddenly disappears. It’s got people talking about Mastodon again, which while open source is really many of the same problems in a different uniform. And so the dreams of 2005 have gone largely unrealized in the last 17 years.

Until now…

If you have been paying attention to whats going on in Web3 then this description of “own your own stuff” probably sounds familiar. And this is where things start getting really, really exciting. (Well, I mean if you are a nerd about this stuff it’s exciting, and I clearly am, and if you are still reading I’ll assume you are as well.) There are two new blockchain based protocols I’ve been playing with, Farcaster & Lens, which are super promising and already delivering on some of these dreams and I wanted to share them here.

Farcaster is a “sufficiently decentralized social network” which combines on-chain (ethereum) with off-chain to create something where people own their own information, their usernames, social graphs and posts, and decentralized enough that anyone can build something on top of those profiles – and enables people to switch between services without needing permission from a company. A quick look at the growing ecosystem shows how people are already putting this to work. For example right now the primary Farcaster application (which is not yet publicly released) doesn’t show public profiles, but Discove.xyz is built on the protocol so you can see my profile here.

(Farcaster as seen in the desktop app)

Lens Protocol is a decentralized social graph built on Polygon which takes the interesting approach of making your username an NFT and then minting NFTs of your connections, which then allows any application using the Lens protocol to just look at your wallet and then immediately build out your profile. For example here is my profile on Lenster which is currently the primary SNS using the protocol, and when I signed into Orb (another currently mobile only option) it instantly populated my profile, posts, and followers/following with everything I’d set up on Lenster.

(my profile on Lenster)
(My profile on Orb)

I didn’t need to export anything from Lenster, I didn’t need to import anything to Orb. Didn’t need permission or anything. When I updated my header image on Orb, the change was immediately reflected on Lenster. I looked at a few other Lens based sites and it was the same everywhere. Possibly even more exciting is that not only the posts were mirrored, so were the reactions. Hearts, replies, shares, etc.. all the same everywhere. It was mind blowing. Of course there are ways to syndicate out a post from a Web 2.0 SNS to others, using IFTTT for example you can write a script to send your Tweets to your Tumblr, or you can connect Twitter to Instagram so that a photo you post on Instagram is announced on Twitter, but the result is that these are still separate sites with individual comment threads and ultimately disconnected. With Lens it’s all the same, because they are decentralized and I as the owner of the post and the profile let each site access it from the blockchain. However we haven’t moved entirely from Web 2.0 to Web3 yet, so luckily there’s a way to send things back as well. I tested it out and it worked brilliantly – this post originated on Orb, was cross posted to Twitter and reflected on Lenster. Obviously any replies on Twitter stay on Twitter, but a reply on Lenster is seen on Orb. It’s magic.

(as seen on Twitter)
(as seen on Lenster)

Looking through the ecosystem lists on both projects I don’t see any option to sync the two yet, however I can’t imagine that is going to be too far away. Similar problems being solved in both and a lot of overlapping ideas. I’m really so excited to see this and to realize we don’t need to have the “____ sucks now because [policy/management] change, I’m deleting this app, where is everyone going next so we can connect there?” conversations every few years any longer. Obviously this is early days, these are beta applications on beta protocols but I can see where it’s heading and it’s so much of what I’ve been dreaming about for almost 20 years. I’m sure it’ll take a little while for this to click with everyone, and a lot of people are going to need to get past their crypto biases, but this really is the empowered user world we’ve been hoping for. If we’re friends, if we’re connected on one of any number of current social networks, I do hope you’ll check this out sooner rather than later. I don’t think mass adoption is an if, it’s a when.

Wallets + Exchanges

I set up my first cryptocurrency wallet about a decade ago. I’ve done it a dozen times or more since then and it’s still confusing. Since about half of those wallet setups have happened in the last 6 months and the number of people asking me how to do it is growing every day I thought it would be helpful to document and explain some of what I’ve learned along the way and hopefully help smooth out some of the learning curve speed bumps. I’ll be talking about Ethereum Wallets and Mac/iOS apps though much of what I’m saying should apply elsewhere too as a lot of it is browser based as well.

The first and most important thing to understand is that Wallets and Exchanges do different things. Though since some exchanges offer wallet services and some wallets now have built in exchange options it gets messy quick. So while there is overlap, I try to think of (and encourage others to think of) them as separate things. Hopefully the following will de-mess-ify things a bit.

Public/Private key: This is what everything is built on when we’re talking about cryptography and cryptocurrency. Very simply: Your public key is your address that you give people so they can send things to you, your private key is the secret thing you keep which allows you to receive what is sent to you. If you loose your private key, you loose access to your assets.

Wallet: As the name suggests a wallet holds your assets, however this gets immediately confusing as your assets are not actually inside your wallet, rather your wallet keeps your private keys so that you can access your assets which are on the blockchain. Remember that with public ledgers/blockchains the ongoing updates just document who holds/owns what but there’s no asset actually traveling to you (like an email) rather the assets are being allocated to different wallets all the time on the blockchain, and if you have the private key to a wallet with an asset then you can choose what to do with that asset – such as send it somewhere else. This is why if someone gets ahold of your private keys they can steal everything from you, and why a wallet that protects your private keys is so important.

Wallets are either custodial or non-custodial, which means either you hold your own private keys or a company holds them for you. This is where the the saying “Not your keys, not your coins” comes into play as technically any assets you have in a custodial wallet could be seized, frozen, stolen, lost, etc and there’s nothing you could do about it, and there’s also risk of policy change at any given moment so the operator of the custodial wallet could decide that you have a 10 day waiting period on any withdraws or impost a limit on how much you can move around per day and since you don’t have your own keys you are 100% at the mercy of the people running that software. As a benefit though if you don’t have your own keys you cant lose or forget them. With a non-custodial wallet you manage your own keys and make your own decisions. Of course if you are sloppy with your security and someone else gets ahold of your keys you can still lose everything, but for a lot of people the risk of losing things because they made a mistake themselves is much easier to accept than the risk of losing everything because of legal or business decisions happening outside of their control.

Metamask is the most popular non-custodial wallet largely because it’s just a browser plugin so it’s really simple to set up and use. If the idea of having a wallet in your browser doesn’t sit right with you, Rainbow is my favorite non-custodial iOS software wallet (which will require you to do some pairing / QR Code scanning to sync with websites). If you want a totally separate air gapped hardware wallet then the best bet is really to buy a Ledger. Though if you are just getting started that might be overkill depending on how much crypto you plan to buy and/or hold. All three of these options have partnerships with exchanges that allow you to buy crypto assets from inside the wallet. Here’s where it gets a little confusing, Coinbase Wallet is also a non-custodial iOS software wallet, which is a different thing than Coinbase which is an exchange that offers a custodial wallet service, similar to Binance or Blockfi or Crypto.com. Coinbase and Coinbase Wallet are owned by the same company and can be set up to work together, but can also be used separately or independently.

Exchange: The primary function of an exchange is, again as the name suggests, to exchange your crypto assets for other crypto assets. Centralized exchanges require you to move assets from your own wallet to theirs first (or buy them directly through their system) while de-centralized exchanges (also called a DEX) will just connect to your own existing wallet to authorize the transaction on the fly.

Coinbase, which I already mentioned, is an example of a centralized exchange. To use Coinbase you need an account, and you likely have to go through some KYC (Know Your Customer) verifications like uploading your ID and proving you are who you say you are and you live where you say you live. You’ll need to either buy crypto assets through Coinbase (and depending on your level of verification you may only be able to buy a small amount each day) or send assets you already have to Coinbase before you can do any kind of exchanges on Coinbase. Uniswap is an example of a DEX. To use Uniswap you just connect your wallet and make your transaction – Uniswap doesn’t need to know anything about you. Coinbase only lets you exchange some assets and offers some level of protection, while Uniswap lets you exchange anything and you are on your own. There are different reasons why either option might be better for you for any given situation but that’s a different article and for the moment let’s just recognize that most people will likely end up using both options at different times for different things.

That was a lot, I know. But you now understand this better than probably 99% of the population.

There’s a few more things. While Metamask is fast and easy, you really don’t want it to be your only wallet. You’ll want to keep enough in it for transactions and impulse buys, but for anything more significant it’s probably better to put it somewhere else. That’s why I like the Metamask + Rainbow combo (or + Ledger if you are getting serious). But here’s some things to note:

When starting any of these apps you will be given the choice to add a wallet or create a wallet. If you have a wallet already and want to use the same one then you will choose “add” and then you’ll need to put in your seed phrase. Wait, what’s a seed phrase? When you create a wallet you will be given a seed phrase (a list of 12-24 words). THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT. Write it down. Protect it. That seed phrase will allow you to rebuild your wallet should you lose access to it. It will also allow anyone else to rebuild your wallet if they are trying to hack you – so don’t put it anywhere someone else might get it. Don’t put it online, don’t put it in a shared note app, don’t put it on a post it note on your monitor. Lock it away somewhere safe. Treat it like a secret password to all of your money, because that’s what it is.

Rainbow will let you add or create several wallets which you can switch between easily for different purposes. Metamask will only give you one wallet, though it will allow you to create different “accounts” which are subsets of the one main wallet. That’s super confusing, I know. Let me draw you a picture:

Don’t ask me why it’s like this, companies just do weird shit ok?

It’s likely that you’ll want a wallet that is accessible from Metamask AND Rainbow, so create it first with Metamask and then using the seed phrase add that to Rainbow. If you do that in the other direction, Rainbow first and then add to Metamask it will replace anything you previously had in Metamask. Trust me here, it’ll save you a bunch of headaches later. Metamask first, then add it to Rainbow. I know more than one person who accidentally wiped their Metamask wallet because they tried to add another wallet later and couldn’t remember where they wrote down their Metamask seed phrase. Just to keep adding more layers of confusion there’s also a Metamask iOS app which you can use to import your Metamask wallet from you browser and that will allow you to authorize various websites from it’s built in mobile browser as well. That might be too much for right now, but just know it’s possible.

That was also a lot, I know. And there’s so much more, but that’s enough to get you going and allow you to start using Web3 websites which use a wallet instead of a login for your account management. Also, having a wallet does not automatically mean having crypto, so you’ll still have to get some, but that’s a whole other thing that I’m not going to walk you through, though Coinbase is probably the thing most people use at least at first. So if you are just starting, you can start there.

For NFTs, Twitter Is The Marketplace

Last month NiftyTable published stats showing that more than half of the traffic going to the major NFT sites was coming from Twitter. At face value, that means more than half of the traffic across several sites for essentially an entire industry coming from one site… that’s insanity! But we need to consider a few things to put that into context. Traffic stats mean people are very regularly clicking links on one site and being taken to another. Not just once, but all the time. This would primarily be driven by discovery, new people finding new artists they are interested in learning more about. Now there are unquestionably lots of Discord servers filled with NFT discussions, but those are largely contained groups who follow each other on the NFT platforms as well, so there’s not a lot of discovery going on beyond the first introductions. (Some of you will note that discoverability is the number one thing I’ve been saying NFT platforms need to work on.) Facebook as well has some chatter, but again it’s not really a place people are discovering new work so much as seeing work from people they are already following or connected to.

Conversely, sites (or apps) like Clubhouse, Instagram and Twitter are more outwardly focused – that is, unless you have a private account, one of the features of these platforms is that they potentially act as a megaphone and can show you off to a much larger audience than you might have on your own. One might think that Instagram, being a primarily visual platform might be the most useful here when it comes to new artist discovery. Similarly the sheer number of Clubhouse rooms dedicated to giving new artists space to talk about or “shill” (I hate that term) their own work would suggest that a lot of discovery is happening there. That said, Instagram and Clubhouse are similar in that they don’t allow linking to other sites. You simply can’t post a clickable link. This means even if you do post (or talk about) a link someone needs to either retype it or copy and paste it into another browser tab, in which case traffic statistics would not know the origin of the that click. So I suspect it’s highly likely that traffic being driven by both Instagram and Clubhouse is being significantly underreported. To what extent it’s impossible to say, but the assumption that no real traffic is coming from those sites is probably incorrect.

But it’s not just technical luck either. No matter how that gets refactored there’s no getting around the fact that a lot of traffic is coming from Twitter, and there’s a reason for that. Clubhouse is fleeting – if you aren’t in the room you miss it. Instagram is more portfolio-ish, comment threads are silo’d and sharing work that you find and like is difficult. Instagram is also afraid of female nipples, among others things, which results in a lot of self censorship and a lot of posts being taken down for violating “community guidelines.” While not all art has nipples, some art does and if a platform is restricting what some artists can do other artists are going to be cautious about using it, even unintentionally. Twitter is non of those things. Sure it’s ephemeral to a degree, but you can easily search and find older posts and connecting different people and disparate conversations is a snap. And showing off artwork, your own or others, is really easy. And it’s also now, in that when there’s a hot topic of the moment, whatever that moment is, everyone knows they can go to Twitter and talk to people about it.

And it’s not insignificant that none of the NFT platforms really have a way to connect with people. Sure you can follow artists you like, sure they will shuffle you along to their Discord servers, and sure some are promising that they have a social component in the works, but right now onsite, there’s nothing social happening. So people go to Twitter, because that’s where all the social is happening.

I was one of the first 140 people to join Twitter in 2006 and a quick look at my archives shows that as much as I’ve loved it, I’ve been critical of the platform for a very long time now. I’ve come close to leaving several times. But I’m still there and I still use it because as annoying as it is for somethings, it’s incredibly valuable for others. Being able to engage with a community is one of those valuable things. As you can imagine after being on a site for 15 years, people ask me all the time if they should be on Twitter. These days, and for quite some time now, I most often tell them no. In general with social media I think it’s better to not do something than to do it poorly, and to do Twitter correctly you need to invest time in it. This is something most people are not willing to do. They want to create an account, post something once or twice a month and then suddenly have thousands of millions of followers. That’s simply not how it works. You have to be engaged, invested, and understand the social norms of the place. So I’ve told people that if they’ve already been on Twitter and have a community there then they should use that, but if they don’t not to bother trying to start at this point.

However.

I think my position on that has evolved in the recent weeks. It’s becoming more and more clear that the vast majority of the discovery, commentary, meta-commentary, community engagement and (barf)networking is happening on Twitter. Not just randomly, this is where people are asking for recommendations, where introductions are being made, where friendships are forming and where connections are being made. Which, oddly, is what Twitter used to be really good at before it got distracted by trying to be “where breaking news happens” or whatever crap marketing line they were using was. Now, my earlier position still holds true – if you aren’t willing or able to commit several hours a week at the very least to interacting with people on Twitter, that is not just posting, but actually engaging, then I still don’t think you should use the site. But if you have an account already which you just aren’t using, or you are willing to put in the work to build up a new one, there’s really no better place right now for interacting with other artists, collectors, and various people of similar interests. It’s not make or break, but it’s noteworthy enough and a shift in what I’ve been vocal about so I thought it should be mentioned. Hope that’s helpful.

And of course if you are on Twitter feel free to follow me, and if you are interested in NFTs of my photography you can check them out here.