i know this is a stupid elementary question but how does one use farcaster as an endpoint

What kind of data are you trying to get from FC?

likes building things • https://alexgrover.me/links

you can read those directly from the protocol, docs here: https://docs.farcaster.xyz/developers/guides/querying/fetch-casts

you can run the following in your terminal to get dan's casts for example:
curl https://hoyt.farcaster.xyz:2281/v1/castsByFid\?fid\=3

if you have a specific use case in mind (eg display in a web app?) I can provide a more complete example if you want