Have noticed there are two popular perspectives on what Farcaster should focus on.

The first is “grow users”. People in this camp tend to be building consumer apps. They also tend to have raised some amount of funding. They have relatively higher time preference.

The second camp is “optimize for decentralization”. It’s nuanced since most people are in favor of some flavor of sufficient decentralization, but they would prefer fewer centralized experiments and more proactive FIP-based experiments. There’s also a general desire for governance that’s not “rough consensus and running code”.

There’s no proposed solution here. We’ve traditionally been more in the first camp. But probably some small changes we could make to make the second camp a bit happier without sacrificing speed of iteration (the most important advantage for an upstart).

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

I think one important caveat for the second camp is the possibility that there are some things in camp #1 that are somehow only enabled by #2.

I don’t know that that’s true, but if you draw parallels to DeFi I think it’s an interesting hypothesis

Interesting. What are some examples that come to mind?

I'm eth newbie..just learning
(working on @farcaster)

terminally.online

from the perspective of an existing user your comments are solid. I'm not trying to draw that comparison to 𝕏

But as a product builder if I use FIDs for identities, until those fuses are burned I am at the mercy of Merkle. (Hence the comparison.)

We almost got burned by this:
When FC was just about to move from testnet to mainnet, we started moving our architecture to use FIDs as the user ID.  We thought "what an awesome composable DID layer". Thankfully we hadn't launched this publicly yet, because shortly after mainnet a change was made to charge $3 for FID creation. The desire was to fix spam, I get that. But it was done in a way that didn't consider how others might compose IDs on an open public blockchain smart contract. The lesson for me was don't build on FIDs until gatewayFrozen == true.

Here's one thread I was just reading: https://warpcast.com/boscolo.eth/0x66c3a23f