Farcaster

Investing at cherry.xyz | writing at luc.cx

In retrospect, decentralized social network has been terrible framing for Farcaster.

Two recent frames that are better:

1. Farcaster is an economy — social network + crypto wallets, small but high GDP per capita, h/t @woj.eth @luc 

2. Programmable social — X APIs are dead, Farcaster APIs are constantly getting better, h/t @six 

It's still (mostly) decentralized under the hood, but lean into the things that it's really good at relative to the competition.

I think part of it is that it's very hard to pass the crypto purity tests for decentralization

Some researchooor will be arguing with you in perpetuity about some edge case where you're not ackshually decentralized

But money? Yeah, it's very easy to tell if you made money or not. Far easier value prop to "prove"

It’s an interesting behavior and I attribute it to the narcissism of small differences

So they end up staying at the local maxima because the available option doesn’t trigger the reaction that a viable but slightly ideologically different option might 

“Perfect is the enemy of good” and all that

Yeah the irony is vast majority of those people (the purity test people) are fine using X (centralized) and Bluesky (less decentralized today; lesson in there).

So revealed preference is audience > ideology.

Anyways, we have to focus on finding people that are excited about cryptonative economy and programmable social experiences. Nothing else matters.