Thoughtful criticism, backed by data, got some of us blackballed on Farcaster. I love the idea of a decentralized protocol, but when power and attention are concentrated within an opinionated client, decentralization doesn’t really exist in practice. And if everyone spends the majority of their time on a single client, can you truly call it a protocol?

In the next few months, the Farcaster protocol will have the most meaningful increase in DAU decentralization since we started.

Base will be adding a Farcaster-powered feed to Coinbase Wallet—an app that has millions of existing users and wallets with balances.

They will have a paths for both existing users and new users to onboard to Farcaster, i.e. creating FIDs.

That's a meaningful, tangible step toward increasing decentralization on the protocol.

So if you're claiming that we're making changes to limit client competition, you are, in fact, factually incorrect (both in what we are working on at the protocol level as well the likely outcome after CB's launch).

> And if everyone spends the majority of their time on a single client, can you truly call it a protocol?

Base launching a Farcaster feed in CB Wallet will change this.

> And if everyone spends the majority of their time on a single client, can you truly call it a protocol?

Base launching a Farcaster feed in CB Wallet will change this.

https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x3ea95b82

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

Love to see a well funded team taking a chance. But I didn’t join yesterday. There any many more dead clients. And the clients I use the most today (Recaster + Tunecaster) both depend on Neynar infrastructure which is a good or bad thing depending on how you want to look at it. Neynar isn’t fully independent from Merkle, I believe you are investors which can be a conflict.

> Neynar isn’t fully independent from Merkle

They are and that's a claim without evidence.

So Neynar can push changes to the protocol without your permission? And investment in Neynar means you have no influence?

Dan has one of the smallest checks in the company and he invested in a company that wasn't even building FC infra. We were building something else at that time and he just wanted to support. 

If we were going to be influenced by investor checks, there are much larger investors to worry about.

building farcaster infra @ /neynar 🪐 | casting @ /rish

Farcaster desperately needed Neynar. Many more ppl can build on here because of you. I’m grateful for that, but I’m just speaking facts here. I appreciate you stepping in to instil confidence, but if you or Merkle go offline right now, the users of the protocol will literally go on Twitter and tweet about how Farcaster is offline. That’s a problem

Ok so Merkle has no influence, all I have to do is take your word for it?

how is that the same as "Neynar isn’t fully independent from Merkle, I believe you are investors which can be a conflict."

doesn't make any sense