Dan Romero on Warpcast

Dan Romero pfp

How decentralized is Farcaster today? Sign ups - You can sign up permissionlessly with the smart contract as a developer - You can sign up with Supercast, Herocast, Farquest (and maybe others...) Data / APIs - You can permissionlessly run a Hub - There are thousands of independently run Hubs - If you don't want to run a Hub, you can use an infra provider like Neynar or Airstack Protocol vs. non-protocol features - Casts, reactions, follows, profiles, verifications are all on Hubs - Not on Hubs: channel metadata, settings and follows, direct casts, location in user profiles If Warpcast labels me as spammy, is that censorship? - Depends on your definition! If you have an existing audience — say 10K followers — then even if you get labeled spammy your existing your followers will see your content in feeds on Warpcast regardless of whether you use Warpcast or not.. - If you don't care about Warpcast (approximately 80% of signer activity), then your follow graph is already decentralized in the procol.

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Dan Romero pfp

What's the most credible argument that Farcaster is de facto centralized? - Most people sign up with Warpcast - If you don't sign up with Warpcast, you can't import your account into Warpcast to access direct casts - Direct casts are drive retention, so without access to direct casts your client will struggle relative to Warpcast - Most people use Warpcast, so if you get labeled as spammy then you will be practically invisible for discovery purposes - Warpcast team is primary developer of Hubble (the main implemention of Hubs) and has GitHub control over smart contract repos; also controls storage fee multi-sig and ability to adjust prices

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Dan Romero pfp

What are you doing to increase decentralization? - We've committed to decentralizing the remaining bits of channels later this year (assuming / pending us figuring out how to make channels "work" from a content supply perspective) - We've been clear that direct casts are a 2025 item for decentralization - Sign in with Farcaster is open source and requires some additional work to add support for other clients (but outside of FarQuest, there is no other complete Farcaster wallet today -- Supercast willing to add functionality in the future) However, the top priority is to increase supply of interesting and entertaining content on the network, which is upstream of increasing the number of (non-spam) retained daily active users.

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Dan Romero pfp

Why aren't you "marketing" to increase the number of "creators" to increase supply of interesting and entertaining content? - Marketing is something you do when you have a clear, repeatable value prop; it's a post-product market fit behavior - Sales is what you do when you haven't figured out the repeatable process and requires a lot of talking to users, product iteration; if you don't have a repeatable sales process, this cannot be outsourced beyond the startup's founders

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Dan Romero pfp

What are you doing to increase the supply of interesting and entertaining content? - We're focused on improving the home feed, onboarding experience (retention of baseline sign ups) and recommendations of content and people from channels; spam filtering, power badge, boosting newer accounts also falls into this group - We're also focused on improving performance of direct casts -- we lose Farcaster-native group chats to Telegram right now because of "snappiness"; this needs to be solved since good group chats are upstream of public posting - Developer experience -- improve our existing "legos" and make sure they work well -- Hubs, frames, composer actions, sign in with Farcaster That's it. We have 3 core priorities. We don't attend conferences or have any other areas of focus.

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Chainleft pfp

Honestly I completely respect that you aren't marketing yet. It makes sense if you don't have a clear path yet.

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sean 🔹 pfp

if you aren’t marketing can you at least make it possible for your users to market your product? the quality of link previews is still too embarrassing to share

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Ox.crypto pfp

So how do we plan on expanding if we won't be doing marketing or such?

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helladj™ pfp

You could target a rogue marketing campaign in cities with ease… think outside the box

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Aunt HoⓂ️ie pfp

Aunt HoⓂ️ie

The platform you have markets itself. It’s the tools that are built on platform that I would see a having a greater need for marketing.

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nkemjika.eth pfp

Personally, I don’t think Farcaster needs marketing. What is needed is for the legos to be complete so devs can keep building cool shit on top of the protocol. It’s almost like building rail tracks and doing marketing for people to use the rail tracks. Building usable products for both normies and crypto savvy people is the marketing we need.

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Emily 🎩🃏🍖 pfp

Emily 🎩🃏🍖

A good product does not need marketing, users are attracted to a good product

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