Vanessa Williams on Warpcast

Alex Garcia pfp

Onchain Social isn’t about replacing platforms like X. It’s about building something that in principle can’t exist on X. What’s one thing Farcaster can enable that no Web2 platform ever could? I'd say one thing Farcaster enables is composability, something no Web2 platform can replicate. Apps and protocols building on top of your profile, content, and interactions, rather than locking them in. Your followers, posts, and reputation move with you, instead of being trapped in a walled garden. Real-World Example: 1. Warpcast (X-like) – You build your audience here. 2. New App Launches (e.g., Farcaster TikTok) – It instantly recognises your profile, followers, and reputation. You don’t need to rebuild from zero. 3. Developers Build Cool Features – "Top Farcaster creators", let you monetise all content, using the same base identity and data. This wouldn’t be possible on X, because they own your data. Farcaster flips that, you own your network, and apps compete to serve you better.

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Vanessa Williams pfp

Vanessa Williams

@fridgebuzz.eth

Bluesky/ATproto also shares these abilities, but the builder community is quite young and there’s not a ton of stuff out there. There is an IG-like image app in beta, for example. Which is to say that web2 is perfectly capable of composability, it’s just X and Meta et al choose not to allow it for the sake of their business model. Web3 is unnecessary for the technical part of that. What web3 brings mostly is financial transactions and other things that can be built on tokens (membership, reputation, etc).

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Moon pfp

If you use the default identity server on BlueSky you don't own your identity, a corporation does. There are ways to avoid that though. Incidentally the Fediverse already has completely open and interoperable reimplementations of X, Reddit, forums, Instagram and Tiktok.

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Moon pfp

A huge centralization and censorship problem with Web2 though is they all are currently completely dependent on DNS.

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Vanessa Williams pfp

Vanessa Williams

@fridgebuzz.eth

That’s true, but… DNS is not centralized in theory, only in practice (Google and CloudFlare handle most of the DNS traffic). The same could be said about the Base blockchain, for example. In theory, it’s decentralized. In practice it is not. They chose DNS because there wasn’t an obvious alternative at the time. And there probably still isn’t, because dependence on a blockchain would introduce too much complexity. (Among other things.)

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Moon pfp

There are legitimate historic reasons for DNS but we're now in a place where you have to pay robber barons to rent them, they can yank them any time, and it's extremely easy for anybody to censor/intercept/fake it. Farcaster isn't perfect but it bypasses all of this!

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Vanessa Williams pfp

Vanessa Williams

@fridgebuzz.eth

As far as domain names go, I’ll grant you they aren’t 100% decentralized. I was thinking more of the protocol itself—which has some problems in practice. But as for Farcaster… the expense of running a hub is not really different than the ATproto relay case, I would guess. My biggest issue with any social media platform is: is it vulnerable to billionaire capture? It’s not an easy question to answer. In each case, the code for most, but not all, of the components is open source. As are the protocol specs. But that isn’t really enough to recreate or maintain the whole application and ecosystem if either Merkle or Bluesky were acquired. FC didn’t have that goal to begin with. AT proto did but there’s much work to be done to make it a reality. It makes me want to start hacking!

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Moon pfp

That is a big concern for me too, one we are grappling with on the Fediverse since Meta Threads joined the network. I am strongly biased toward Fediverse but there are several problems to overcome and I'm not sure at current inertia levels that is going to happen. I don't think the thing that wins has been invented yet lol.

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Vanessa Williams pfp

Vanessa Williams

@fridgebuzz.eth

What exactly is the problem with Threads? Other than many server operators may not want to federate with it.

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Moon pfp

Just that overnight, the largest userbase centered on one entity joined. Meta is untrustworthy, they've embraced open standards to build their audience before, then abandoned them when they didn't need them anymore. I am concerned in the meantime they will hijack the collaborative development process the current Fediverse builds on.

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