Has anyone done a proper deep dive into Farcaster? Been hearing more from my normie startup friends that it's getting hugely popular with the Silicon Valley crowd.
I know already it's a shitcoin so no need to bang that drum. I'm just curious about what we can learn from it's growth (I'm guessing it's mostly fueled by VC dollars going into marketing).
We’ve talked about it quite a bit at SovEng and nostr:npub1zach44xjpc4yyhx6pgse2cj2pf98838kja03dv2e8ly8lfr094vqvm5dy5 did a presentation about it.
It requires data consensus to run a hub and when this was pointed out to the team as a retarded design they say they are not interested in philosophical discussions
they only talk about tokens on FC, it's not a venue for general discussion
the growth is almost certainly purely because of it being used to hype new shitcoins, and telling stories about how the one in a million who actually didn't become poorer from it "did it" which will be total nonsense but all the desperados will lap it up
I've tried to use it before to learn about their UI/UX, but I've give up because no ways to create an account without provide phone number 🫠
the difference between shitcoiners and bitcoiners eh?
weak-ass 2fa? and no self sovereign identity?
hard pass
I saw the relevant news that a project raised $10 million. The huge amount of funds is incomparable to nostr's project.
"The Web3 social application Kiosk, based on Farcaster, recently announced that it has successfully raised $10 million in funding. The investment round was led by Electric Capital, with participation from a16z Crypto, USV, and Variant Fund ”
https://decrypt.co/229077/ethereum-blogging-protocol-mirror-farcaster-social-media-pivot?amp=1
Slow and steady wins the race.
Churning through VCs money, who are only in it for pumping & dumping shitcoins has yielded absolutely nothing out of the whole web3 hypecycle - Farcaster will be no different when the bear market returns.
#nostr is growing incredibly already
nostr:note1wwcrml443hcsgge6j84ttxm0pg8e8d6afh2m524pg9n0fk9cu3sqtk2gcr
💯Every step nostr takes is solid and our foundation is very solid.
Yes, I've spent a lot of time digging into Farcaster. Here are some of my thoughts:
1. Right now I'd argue that the content on Farcaster is more appealing to most ppl than the content on Nostr. It is much more of a techno-optimist/VC crowd with some Ethereum discussion sprinkled in while Nostr is 90%+ Bitcoin-focused discussions with some derision toward those that don't fall in line with the laser-eye-maxi worldview.
2. They have a few clear short-term advantages, mainly that Warpcast (the main Farcaster client and also the team developing the Farcaster "protocol") raised 30m from a16z back in 2021 and recently raised more from Paradigm valuing their company over 1B.
This allows them to have a cracked dev team of engineers creating the most Twitter-like mobile and desktop experience possible. When using their app, you never run into issues like profiles failing to load, threads not showing up correctly, or missing notes from ppl you follow (all issues that while we're improving, are still commonplace on most Nostr clients).
3. "Protocol"-level advantages. I put the word protocol in quotes because it is a bit of a stretch to call it that. The official Farcaster GitHub has 20 contributors last I'd check and essentially no community discussion or PRs to speak of. The Warpcast team is what drives this ship and that leads to well-thought-out and robustly implemented features when they are added. One of the specific protocol-level advantages that they have for now (this will bite them in the ass at some point) is that all "Hubs" (their version of relays) must have a full global state and be in consensus with all other hubs. This allows performance to end up being much better for the average user. No connecting to 20 different relays to find a note. Just make HTTP requests to warpcasts cached servers and you get all the data you can possibly need quickly and simply. For the end user, this translates to an identical experience to Twitter and aligns with what most tech-ppl expect to interact with in 2024. Obviously, there are HUGE flaws with this kind of model and I'm very skeptical of how it will scale once its centralization is tested, but, for now, I'm just going to focus on the reason why I believe Farcaster has gained popularity recently.
4. Now on to the shit-coinery. Yes, there is a Warpcast token called "Warps" and I believe that there is some utility within the Warpcast client (like creating custom channels) but not at a protocol level itself. Apparently, a bunch of early Farcaster users were airdropped a bunch of this stuff and made a killing, so it's fair to say that some users are there with the hopes of making a bag from an air-drop down the line. With that being said, I think it's cope for us on Nostr to say "They're just on Farcaster for the token" since there is clearly real interest and discussion going on there.
5. We should give them credit for a few things that they have done well. It's clear that their "Frames" product has been received well by users and is a legitimately innovative concept to add to a social platform. I also think some of their account abstraction stuff is pretty cool in that the private key you use to log into clients isn't the same as your core account private key, so if a client ever rugs, you aren't totally screwed.
This podcast will give you a good primer on how things work in Farcaster land and how they think about the space as a whole:
Is there anything we can borrow from them to improve our experience without centralizing? The key stuff sounds useful.
Yes, in fact thats exactly what I'm working on now 😏
Not the key stuff, but some of the other UX wins that they have I think can be bridged over
Nice 👍 I’m always open to ideas 💡
Frames is cool man!
#hypernotes might be the way do that on Nostr, at least me I'm totally going that direction.
100% would love to see more hypernote stuff on Nostr!
What are hypernotes?
Notes with hypertext.
nostr:npub1p4kg8zxukpym3h20erfa3samj00rm2gt4q5wfuyu3tg0x3jg3gesvncxf8 came up with it at #SovEng.
https://github.com/futurepaul/hypernote/
If you standardise their size (say 640 by 380 px), I think you can do reeeaaally cool stuff with this.
This is all super helpful. The speed of having a single team, plus the VC $$$ to market and hype and airdrop all makes total sense.
I'd love to catch up sometime and hear what you're working on related to some of the UI stuff there.
they are just on it for the tokens and the rainbow coin love, idgaf what you say
you can't make a POP and SMTP with a crack team of ninja devs with way too much VC money, just read the history of compuserve and AOL et al... where are they now? oh yeah, they got replaced with a protocol that was crappy and simple, sound familiar?
short term focus = short term life
Lesseee.... I forecast that farcast will meet a similar fate to bluesky
once those dollars are gone, the people building (and using, incentivized by token drops) will disappear. "long term means only as long as the VC money is flowing. The vibes i get from the guy on the YT vid is classic non believable bro.
Not being actually decentralized by global sync relays to make it "smooth", but to grab as many users as possible is the VC game to spoof people into thinking they have vertical "organic" growth.
Hosting a hackathon in Santa Monica? Wow how myopic this is. You're attracting people to tinsel town? So clearly its all artificial, a game that is repeated 10000x in the valley, and hundreds of these series A 100M startups fail all the time. *yawn* 20+ years of SV and I am so jaded by the same song and dance and same empty people.
How about hosting a decentralized social media hackathon in Kampala, Uganda? Or maybe Swellendam, South Africa? They probably don't even know where these places on a map! 😂
If nostr is only going to be 5% of the global market so be it. Growth that is organic will have its ups and downs. Sustaining power, now that is something money can't buy.
To #Nostr:
Be more aggressive. Heads Down. Work Together. Drive growth in communities first. Long term means beyond your life time. Not when the Series D Money runs out and you have no revenue.
Ignore the Noise. Be Real. Peace out. ☮️✌️
