Farcaster

The Farcaster protocol does very little today in the way of solving conflicts or UX problems around multiple competing clients; which, one might expect, is the hard & important thing to solve in a social protocol.

Farcaster is being controlled & governed by the 99% client (Warpcast), repeatedly making choices that limit the ability of alternate clients to build and compete (See SIWF, Messaging, Channels).

As a builder, it's unclear why Farcaster is not any different from early Twitter, which was open, had alt clients, but one overwhelmingly dominant client. Once Twitter became big enough, it shifted from attracting to extracting, and shut down their API, becoming the Twitter of today, ruled by a benevolent dictator. Is Farcaster/Warpcast just running back the Twitter playbook? 

Why should we users and builders trust Warpcast's continued benevolence, when their short term choices are already showing a willingness to compromise on the Protocol part in the name of monoclient growth?

Building FOSS via @frames, /open-frames to help decentralized social win. a16z CSX23. farcasterchannels.com farcaster.id

This is a thoughtful analysis! Balancing user experience and governance in decentralized protocols like Farcaster is indeed a complex challenge. The graphs highlight an important tension between growth and long-term sustainability for both users and developers. It’ll be interesting to see how Farcaster evolves to address these trade-offs effectively.