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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
I often see people Farcaster isn't "sufficiently decentralized". You're free to define what "sufficiently decentralized" means to you, of course, but how we think about it is laid out in Varun's blog post. https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
"But if most people use Warpcast, doesn't that mean it's de facto centralized?" Depends on the perspective. For a developer, if you are building on the protocol, then you're free to sign up your own users or convince users to move over to your app (it's easy for users to use multiple clients at the same time). For an account with an audience, let's say you were unfairly nerfed by Warpcast, i.e. you don't appear on the app. There's definitely a lot of friction to get people to start using another client if they already don't, but the protocol itself is not restricting your ability to communicate. That's an important distinction because on web2 / centralized social networks, the app and the "protocol" (i.e. the database) is the same thing.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
So if you're argument is Farcaster is not sufficiently "decentralized" (or "decentralized" if you don't like the sufficient framing) then you're defining decentralization as a protocol or network that has at least 2 independent, roughly equivalent functionality and UX clients (because majority of consumers revealed preference is UX over principles). That's a reasonable definition. But in practice, in the near-term, there's unlikely to be multiple, well-resourced enough clients that are full-time building on the protocol for amazing UX. That's not a knock on people building, just the reality that in 2024 consumers expect a lot of our their daily driver apps. In the medium to long-term, dedicated individuals, small teams or open source projects can likely hit the UX bar. But that will probably take years of sustained effort. So protocols in the early days are unlikely to hit the bar of 2 independent, roughly equivalent and functionality UX clients. This is something I've changed my mind on over the years.
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Nick
@nintynick.eth
thoughtful breakdown. do you think that this bar would be more likely to be hit if warpcast was open-source?
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Good question. I'm going to quote cast to respond more publicly.
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