Hmmm, yeah, I'd say the summary is somewhat accurate. I'll address some of them.
1. This one is probably the only bullet point that I'd say it got totally wrong. 🙂 It's not tied to any Ethereum address you have. You get issued a new Ethereum address (which is relatively abstracted out), and no, there are no blockchain fees or anything described there. There's no censorship risk...the protocol is the protocol, and it's completely uncensored. Similar to nostr, at the client level, one can curate what they see.
2. This is accurate. I'm not sure what the technical requirements are to host a nostr relay, but I host a personal and private one on a mini PC with an N95 chip, so I'd imagine fairly low? I haven't looked into the requirements for a hub on Farcaster lately, but my vague recollection was that it is fairly high (like you'd need a powerful CPU, high RAM, LOTs of storage space, etc.)
3. Sort of accurate. There is a one-time fee to join (no annual fees) that is intended to add friction to spammers. I think it has helped keep the protocol relatively spam-free, but yeah, I would say it's a fair point. I read a couple of days ago they are going to sunset this within the next few months, but I didn't read the details, and I'm assuming there might be some asterisks involved.
4. True. To my knowledge, it cannot be forked, and yes, it's controlled by a small team. There is a bi-weekly dev call on Thursdays (which I suppose you can argue the fact one exists also highlights its centralization, haha). The protocol is mostly "raw," and those bi-weekly calls are intended more to talk about features for the flagship client, Warpcast, but protocol updates/changes do come up sometimes.
5. Frames are old...people have moved on to building mini-apps. Yeah, they do rely on external servers, but I feel like that's more decentralized than centralized?
Thanks for sharing -- it's helped me keep me intellectually honest and rethink some of my thoughts around Farcaster.
Even though I've got a busy professional and personal life, I try to maintain some sort of social media presence on the more notable decentralized platforms because I find a lot of value in self-sovereignty in data. From what I've seen so far, Farcaster has done the best job (albeit still imperfect) of finding that sweet spot of maintaining a relatively decentralized protocol at a relatively refined user experience. From what I've seen so far, Nostr is the most decentralized, but in some ways, that's also brought on some pain points. I'm not quite ready yet to submit a hypothesis yet though that you can't have the best of both worlds yet (full decentralization & optimal user experience).
