Farcaster

The future of social media is envisioned as a space where platforms are governed by the participants themselves, rather than being controlled by corporate gatekeepers. So how are we feeling?

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Read, Write, Own.

The ownership part is very important, and it’s not supposed to be just your FID, but also the value that the network creates. The only value I’ve seen so far is the people I’ve met and the memecoins. Merkle raised money for Warpcast, not the network. 

You can definitely spin up your own client and be as opinionated or open as you want. But most clients today are dependent on a single infrastructure player which is Neynar, so not very decentralized. But the main issue is that the protocol is being maintained and developed by the dominant client. It has been captured and you must go through Merkle in order to implement any of your own ideas.

Some thoughts -

The Farcaster definition for sufficient decentralization is "if two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it" and that's good enough for me for a social network protocol.  My expectation when I joined wasn't so much that we as users would "own the network" but that we would "own our identity"

Your desire - for a network or platform governed by users - couldn't that be deployed at a client level? Imagine an alt warpcast that is user owned and user governed? Couldn't that achieve what you want even if FC stays the same?

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I agree, the potential for participant governance is there, but it still feels more like web2.5 to me, for lack of a better term.

I’m also concerned about the lack of privacy here. Anything you say can be used without your permission for any purpose someone might think of. What control do I have if someone decides to train an AI agent using my data?

It feels like farcaster is very much not governed by its participants at this stage but relative to big tech social the environment does feel a lot more malleable

The fact that I have to pay a recurring fee or else my data becomes unavailable makes me feel less in control

I think FC enables us to own our identity, which to me is the core value prop besides a more crypto native social feed with wallets etc.

still a long way to go before users “own” the network, though, and I’m not sure that’s even Merkle’s goal. if you read Dan’s thoughts on sufficient decentralization, it’s spelled out pretty clearly imo.

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