# Building Sopha, and why curation is needed - Chris (chriscocreated) x Zaal (2026-06-08)

> A ZABAL Gamez workshop. Timestamped transcript (filler lightly trimmed; brand names
> corrected: Sopha, Farcaster, Neynar, Hypersnap). The timestamps deep-link the video on the
> recording page. Find Sopha: @chriscocreated and @sopha on Farcaster, sopha.social.

---

[00:00:00] Visit zabalgamez.com. That's Z-A-B-A-L gamez.com and sign up. Decentralized energy, let's talk about Web 3

[00:00:13] Thank you, Chris, for giving me the opportunity to chat with you a little bit longer, for giving us the opportunity to learn, learn a little bit more about Sopha, how you built it, and why you built it.

[00:00:22] So, I'll just give a quick, short explanation of the Zabal Gamez. ultimately, we're doing a three-month-long build-a-thon, with the first month being workshops, the second month being an open build, and the third month being a build in public, with curated builders. So, that curated builders part is actually a really interesting topic of conversation that we'll come back to here with Sopha.

[00:00:44] but today we're here to talk with Chris, who founded a Farcaster .... client focused on curation, and that's what led me here to these weekly meetings that Chris hosts. And, yeah, I'll let Chris take it away, share a little bit [00:01:00] about Sopha, share about your, your journey, your experience. I'll be listening in here and there, but, but yeah, I appreciate your time.

[00:01:07] I appreciate you coming in and sharing with us. And, yeah, I'll just kick it over to you to take it away Thanks, Zaal. Appreciate it, man. so Sopha is a Farcaster client focused on the high signal stuff. That's, that's the core of it. Normally it's long form, but really the, the core of it is the deep interesting stuff.

[00:01:36] You know, the feed's ephemeral. It's like, you know, and we all enjoy it, and we go there and we're shit posting about whatever, and occasionally stuff pops up. But there's a load of really smart people thinking deeply about a load of stuff, and there's so much interesting stuff on Farcaster that we just miss.

[00:01:55] And so Farcaster is really, um ... [00:02:00] You know, it's, that's the daily driver, whichever client you're gonna use. Sopha's not looking to, to replace that. What Sopha is, is a kind of intentional third place, a, a coffee shop or a library or, a, a cultural center, that's there when you kind of wanna sit down, wanna focus a bit, and wanna get into some of the really interesting stuff, which is kind of why we're hanging out with all these people here in the first place, right?

[00:02:32] Well, either that or in the hope of making gazillions of dollars from heaven. but yeah, you know, fund- fundamentally, that's the ... That's what makes Farcaster interesting is the people on it and, and this is kind of there to capture the, the, the deeper thoughts, the longer takes on it. it came about, I don't know, [00:03:00] probably seven, eight months ago now when, when the Farcaster was going to shit in a meme coin.

[00:03:10] like it was just, you know, everything was, was about tokens. And like I got nothing wrong, no problem with tokens, but it was destroying the core experience that I was on Farcaster for, which was to hang out with really interesting thinkers and artists and builders and makers, on the feed. And I kept kind of going like, "If only someone would build a client focused on depth," and, and nobody did.

[00:03:38] And at some point I kind of went, "Aha- Maybe, maybe now that we've got really decent vibe coding, I might be the person in the room that needs to do this. and so it kind of ... It was kinda like a s- and I've been, you know, chatting to, to, to friends and people on, [00:04:00] on and around Farcaster, and it's kinda like it was sort of became a, like, let's save Farcaster mission almost from a kind of cultural perspective.

[00:04:09] and then obviously everything happened, where w- January, February time, I can't quite remember w- where we were on timing, but you know, Neynar took over and suddenly Farcaster's like g- much more heading in the direction that, that I kind of was hoping for back in No- back in kind of November. and, and so that kind of, the kind of urgent mission to, to be my part of saving Farcaster felt, felt kinda less im- important perhaps, but what's still absolutely at the heart of it is a bringing together of high signal people, high signal

[00:04:50] I don't wanna use the word content really, but fine. High signal writing, and, and, and high sing- signal art. [00:05:00] and that really, excuse me, is, is what this space is, is for. it's still emerging. there's still plenty of kind of space and scope for people to, to come into it. the, the kind of two core things we do, one is a community call, once a week, and that's kind of very open, fluid conversation on the Sopha about whatever's up around this tech-enabled future that we're all hanging out in and, and kind of how we live well, in that.

[00:05:41] And then the, the second part of it is the client, and that is a, at its core a curated feed of high signal, um- Writing our thoughts on [00:06:00] Farcaster. It's curated by everyone in the Sopha community who has a curator role. that's very straightforward to get, essentially. You just need to engage with me, and, and leave me feeling like you're, you're gonna make a, a positive, contribution, and you've got, you've got a taste and judgment that kind of fits in with, with the, with the rest of us.

[00:06:30] and that's, that's the core feed. BradQ does a dedicated feed called The Pulse, and that's really the kind of key Farcaster, moments, kind of the pulse of Farcaster really, and, and that's, that's a big, easy way to- I love it, Chris. I think there's so many pieces to tap in on, and in this kind of cozy corner of Farcaster, curating the feed even more becomes [00:07:00] very valuable, to one i- in how they kind of, look at Farcaster, right?

[00:07:08] Yeah. And, and see their front end. I would love for you to share a little bit more about, like, the culture that you're trying to drive here, as well as the benefit of other individuals coming in, like you, seeing a problem, seeing a, a missing space, and coming in and saying, "Hey, I might not know exactly how to solve this, but here's an idea.

[00:07:28] I'm gonna try it out, customize the front end, then see how you can interact with this network, from my angle, from my lens," and then other people coming in and doing that as well. I would love to hear your thoughts on, like, how building a client has been very powerful, as opposed to a different platform, where you may not have been able to do the same thing.

[00:07:47] Right, yeah, and that, that's, that's the crazy cool thing about this, is with all the open data that's on Farcaster with the, with the tooling, that [00:08:00] Neynar gives us, and, and now, Hypersnap as well. Not that I've got too much into that, but there's basically two, two complete ecosystems looking to empower builders.

[00:08:11] And so, it's, it's super easy to create a way of seeing the information that's on, that's on the Farcaster feed. So we can, we can all get super opinionated about it and, um- It's, it's really just a way for us to bring whatever kind of culture and vibe we wanna, wanna bring. My, my thing's kind of depth, intentionality, how, how we live well ultimately, and that's, that's kind of what we're doing on the, on the Sopha with, with writers and artists and thinkers.

[00:08:50] but, you know, how, what, 37, are up to with their whole kind of [00:09:00] crazy aesthetic Windows machine from, from 2000 or whatever it, whatever the look is, totally different take. And I think there's loads of opportunity for us to get away from the conventional flat doom scrolling, social feed. And we're super empowered to do that, and it's really just a question of getting your, getting your, vibe coding platform of choice hooked up, grabbing a, an, an neynar, account and, and you can have something up and running and flying, in, in very little time really

[00:09:53] Yeah, it was actually pretty crazy how easy and modular the system was to play with. there was a [00:10:00] day, I don't know exactly what caused my push towards it, but I was like, "I'm gonna build a client today." or, "I'm gonna start." and by the end of the day or couple hours, of playing with it, I got it, you know, not perfect, but it was actively posting to Farcaster from my website.

[00:10:15] And to me, that's a really cool win from someone who's not a traditional coder with very little technical experience. But to be able to spin something like that up that previously only a developer could do or, an individual with money to pay a developer could do. Yeah. and I think this leads to a lot more creative opportunities because we have artists, we have writers, we have creators of different kinds all, all building their own custom tool.

[00:10:43] Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And then we've got this whole nested stack as well, right? You don't have to, you don't have to build an entire website. And y- y- like you say, we call about, talk about a client, but really all we're talking about is a website that happens to show data from the Farcaster, [00:11:00] feed. but you know, th- in a way, that's the biggest thing.

[00:11:04] and like, the biggest undertaking is, is, is a few hours to get something meaningful. but then, then we've got mini apps, which are just little web apps basically that, that will, that are even easier to do and will show up in the, in the main clients. And then, and then snaps, which you can, you can just type in a thing that you want it to do and have something pretty cool within 30 seconds if you want

[00:11:35] Yeah, I think all of those different, styles of media is very interesting. I think one of the things Farcaster offers that not a lot of other social media platforms offer is the fact that you can- is the fact that you can ultimately, like, build your own experience. You're not, beholden to the algorithm.

[00:11:56] You kinda- Right ... create your own algorithm, and I think that's one of the biggest [00:12:00] challenges people have with social media today. So I would love to know the future of Sopha, Chris. Where does your mind go? Where do you wanna see Sopha a year from now? Never mind maybe Farcaster also as a whole. Yeah. So I mean, F- Farcaster itself is a, is a wild, fascinating, experiment.

[00:12:21] I would, I would love us to, to keep, to keep growing the network of, of kind of fascinating people obviously. but-

[00:12:38] I kind of hope that we get a crazy, weird explosion of cool stuff going on that's actually compelling enough to, to bring people over here. And so they're not coming in the hope of making money. They're, they're coming in because it's one of the most fun places to be online. so that, [00:13:00] that's kind of the, the heart of my hope for it.

[00:13:03] in terms of what's happening with Sopha and the future of that, really what I'm building for is a bigger community of like-minded people who are interested in depth, in how to live well, in all the things that this technology enables, and, and how we, collectively come together, in this kind of- in this scenius, to use, the, the kind of word that was not coined by Adrian, but, yeah, brought, brought in, brought in, into our language here.

[00:13:44] and that's, that's kind of- that's the underlying core. we got our second, purple funding, that's, just been approved, [00:14:00] which is gonna help See Sopha through the, the next year. it, it supports us for the first six months to, to kind of get something up and running. and now the, the, the DAO's supporting it to, to build.

[00:14:18] There's a few experiments we're gonna run, the biggest one of which is, rewarding the, curators. everyone's doing it for the, for the love at the moment, and I think, I think we all kind of get plenty out of that, but, I'm keen to start exploring how there is a value loop inside of this curation process.

[00:14:40] 'Cause, 'cause I know a lot of people, value the feed that the curators bring together, and how we can, give something back in terms of some of that financial value. so, so a bunch of that Sopha funding is gonna go to some [00:15:00] experiments in, in rewarding curators. it's not gonna be anything major at all, but it's-- I think it, it never hurts.

[00:15:07] I think we saw that from kind of the leaderboard experiment, flawed as it was perhaps in lots of ways. It, it really did drive a lot of energy, even though people were maybe only getting, a few bucks from it. It did, it did change, change the dynamic. So gonna explore that, see how we, can build sustainability into, into the ecosystem.

[00:15:33] people who are valuing the other end, like sort of receiving it, where that, where, where that might be recognized. Um- The Purple Props also gonna pay for the infra, 'cause obviously there's, there's backend costs, to, to doing stuff at, at a reasonable bit of scale. so that's gonna cover that, which is fab.

[00:15:58] And we're also [00:16:00] gonna do some experiments in kind of the cultural center space and thinking about, you know, what, what kind of workshops might, might be fun to have. Because I think one of the, one of the things that's cool about Sopha is the, the live experience. and, and actually get on- getting on these kind of video calls and, and seeing each other and, and connecting.

[00:16:20] And I'm really curious about, you know, what would a Farcaster choir look like? Or, maybe they're, you know, we're doing an online improv together or, live drawing. Who knows? but yeah, to kind of... So anyone, and that is an open invitation. If, if you're a specialist at running online live experiences in some way, then, then that would be super cool to, to hear about from, from anyone listening to this.

[00:16:51] so those are kind of some of the major, the major experiments, and, and tied into those, those kind of economic ones is [00:17:00] definitely a conversation about, the potential for a token, and what we might do with that and what that enables, but that's definitely not gonna be anything we're rushing into.

[00:17:12] That's gonna be thoughtfully designed. no, no big kind of speculative mechanics, just, yeah, something that, that, that kind of feeds, the ecosystem in a, in a positive some way and doesn't really leave space for extraction. So, yeah, that's, that's the kind of... Yeah, that's, that's the space we're exploring, over the next, six to 12 months, I think.

[00:17:46] I love it, Chris. It's really cool to see that, you created something in Farcaster, and the community helped fund that for the next year as well. So a entity within this [00:18:00] Farcaster ecosystem was help- help- is helping you move it forward. So thank you so much for creating Sopha, Chris. Thank you for sharing so many awesome things.

[00:18:08] Do you wanna share where people can find you or find Sopha online? Yeah. Hell yeah. So on Farcaster's the, the place to look it up. I'm @chriscocreated. and Sopha is @Sopha, spelt S-O-P-H-A. So it's a P-H instead of a- an F. and the website is Sopha.social Amazing. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate your time My pleasure.

[00:18:41] And, uh- Thank you, Zaal. ... anyone else who popped in