Some Thoughts on the Crash and the Future of TerraSpaces…
Hi everyone, I’m Finn. If you didn’t know, I’m the one who runs TerraSpaces. I am TerraSpaces. A lot of people think we have a whole team of interns or bots working here, but it’s really just been me this whole time. Here’s a little info on who I am and how I got here for all the new people.
Back in October 2021, a friend of mine asked me to come to the Terra ecosystem and record the Twitter spaces that they were doing. He said no one was recording them and people kept missing all the information that was being discussed.
I’ve been podcasting in one form or another since 2008, so I figured sure, this would be fun. I was scheduling interviews with protocols and NFT projects. I created the Pudcast (nft podcast), and the TerraSpaces podcast, which was basically audio lore traveling throughout the cosmos chatting with interesting projects and protocols.
I recorded spaces when I wasn’t working at my day job or recording interviews, and before long, people were asking me to cover more and more spaces. I made a joke that the first group to give me 50k would get my recording services for a year.
The next morning I woke up to a message from Do Kwon. Thinking it was my friends trolling me or something, I frantically double and triple checked. Sure enough it was him! He asked for my Terra address and told me to quit my job because he was going to fund TerraSpaces.
I did exactly that. The following Monday I put in my two weeks notice, and started recording all the spaces I could. After a while I had to make the decision to stop producing my own podcasts, and focus solely on recording Twitter spaces. I figured there were plenty of people hosting spaces, but no one was recording, editing, and archiving them, so that’s where my time was best spent.
Between Terra, Cosmos, Secret, Osmosis, and the VGX spaces I was recording, I just didn’t have the time. I was already working 3 times the hours for the same amount of pay. But sometimes in life we just do things because we enjoy doing them, not because we’re in it for the money.
Speaking of not being in it for the money, I also make rap music when I’m not recording or editing spaces. All the music at the end of the spaces is from my albums. The most recent, Project Survival, can be found here.
You can find links to all my other work like Virus Diaries, and Plan B at the bottom of the HearNow page. You can also find a more complete discography of my work here on Bandcamp. Granted, the older shit is garbage, but it’s fun to hear the evolution.
Everything was going great, until the crash. I managed to post 969 pieces of audio ranging in length from 1 to 3 hours since late October. All audio that would otherwise be lost to the Ether. Why?
For those who aren’t aware, when you use the Twitter space record function, it only keeps the audio for 30 days. If you don’t capture it in that timeframe, it’s gone.
The other benefit of TerraSpaces / IBC Spaces is that you can search the site for different tags, making it a lot easier to find the space you are trying to listen to. Having an RSS feed handling all the audio content also allows the spaces to end up on all the podcast platforms.
That’s right! TerraSpaces is on Spotify, Stitcher, I Heart Radio, Google, and Apple podcasts. This increases the communal reach, and puts the audio in front of a whole demographic of people that may not necessarily be in the Cosmos ecosystem.
If you are curious about the stats, I made a thread about them here on Twitter.
I started this thing with my own personal computer, and then thanks to the community, and Orbital Command, was able to get two more just to keep up. I built a WordPress site just like I did back in 2008, and the next thing I knew I was up and running.
Currently I can record up to three spaces at the same time, or I can record two spaces and get my editing done on the third computer.
Let’s talk about editing real quick. I take my time and go through each Twitter space to remove all the unnecessary silences and noise. I also manually adjust the levels so they are as uniform as possible.
I believe this allows the listener to more easily absorb the information without having to constantly stop and rewind, or turn the volume up and down as new speakers step up to speak.
All this work takes a LOT of time, but I feel like it’s worth it. I could never code or do anything useful like that, so being able to record and archive spaces let’s me participate in the decentralized future we all want to see built.
Like a lot of you, I was absolutely rekt during this crash, or attack, or whatever people want to call it. I’m a firm believer in dog fooding the ecosystem I swim in, and thus had my whole entire savings in Anchor Protocol. I didn’t lose as much as a lot of others, but I certainly lost everything I had worked so hard these last several years to save.
To be clear this wasn’t my first rodeo getting rekt in crypto, but for some reason this time felt different. I was never this emotionally invested in an ecosystem. I truly believe in what the builders are building here. The whole idea of decentralized finance and banking the unbanked really vibes with me. This loss felt personal, and it got me bad.
I absolutely believe that if we all work together, eventually we can build something that the powers that be won’t be able to tear down. But I think we’re only going to get there together, by growing and nurturing these communities that pop up around the space.
If you ever have any questions, or just want to say hi, you can hop in the TerraSpaces TG or send me a DM on the bird app.
I haven’t really had a day off since I started this thing, so I’m going to take a couple days this week to completely unplug and reset before starting over. You can check the schedule here to see what’s coming up and what’s already been recorded.
I hope this helps give you a little insight into who I am, and what I’m trying to do here at TerraSpaces. If you want to actually see me, Lunatic Station did an interview with me back in February here.
If you would like to contribute to keeping TerraSpaces alive, head over to TerraSpaces.org/donate and show some love!
Thank you all so much for the support. I know it’s been rough. Loss is always relative. It’s been harder for some than it has been for others, but we will come out the other side a stronger, and much wiser community. Mush love y’all!
— Finn
Support TerraSpaces
Make sure to check out the newest tracks from Finn and the RAC FM gang over at ImaginetheSmell.org! The majority of the music at the end of these spaces can be found streaming over on Spotify, and the rest of the streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music.
Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.