Product

I always look for historical analogs. There was a time when consumer adoption of intranets (AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy) exceeded consumer adoption of the Internet. Proximity to blockchain architecture rather than centralized Web 2.0 architecture is crudely analogous.

The historic disruptor was the utility and adoption of the World Wide Web as a decentralized protocol. The Internet had numerous early protocols: Telnet, Usenet, IRC, Gopher, etc. None of these drove adoption with irresistible cost savings through merging of labor and objectives.

What is 2024’s World Wide Web equivalent? Is it Farcaster itself and we’re just in the year 1990 on the WWW adoption curve? Where does a flexible Layer 1 social protocol solve problems that are created by needing to appeal to X/Twitter, Threads, Layer 2’s like Lens and more closed architectures like BlueSky?

Crudely put, what causes today’s investor to say “Fuck it, use Farcaster” the same way investors slowly gave up on building in Compuserve and Prodigy?