Farcaster

customer support @supercast

trying to sound smart /doingnumbers

Investing at cherry.xyz | writing at luc.cx

In retrospect, decentralized social network has been terrible framing for Farcaster.

Two recent frames that are better:

1. Farcaster is an economy — social network + crypto wallets, small but high GDP per capita, h/t @woj.eth @luc 

2. Programmable social — X APIs are dead, Farcaster APIs are constantly getting better, h/t @six 

It's still (mostly) decentralized under the hood, but lean into the things that it's really good at relative to the competition.

Seems to be working as an alright frame for Bluesky, though they have much less crypto focus.

The vast majority of people are not joining Bluesky because it's decentralized. They are joining a centralized app (Bluesky) that's not controlled by Elon and offers a decent UX. And that's been extraordinarily successful for them!

If that was the primary criteria, Mastodon, Nostr or Farcaster are more decentralized today.

Good write up on all the stuff that's not decentralized today on Bsky.

I like pleasure spiked with blockchain and music is my aeroplane. It's my aeroplane. /pizzadao underboss and /pixelwooks co-lead. Featured in "Number Go Up" 📖

The vast majority of people are not joining Bluesky because it's decentralized. They are joining a centralized app (Bluesky) that's not controlled by Elon and offers a decent UX. And that's been extraordinarily successful for them!

If that was the primary criteria, Mastodon, Nostr or Farcaster are more decentralized today.

Good write up on all the stuff that's not decentralized today on Bsky.
https://anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/maybe-bluesky-has-won

Good points. I guess I didn't consider the fact that people aren't joining because of the degree of decentralization. Certainly they are mostly joining because of gripes with other platforms (mainly Twitter and Meta-owned).

September 2023 was when I had had enough of Twitter and went looking for an alternative. I got a Bluesky invite at the time and began poking around. There were less than a million people on there at that time.

A few weeks later I noticed people saying Vitalik had been mostly ignoring Twitter and posting over here a bit, so I signed up and that brings us to now.

I'm still very anti Elon and have been since before the pandemic, but certainly this post election environment has lead to a critical mass of users to being reached for Bluesky, particularly amongst liberals, and now network effect has taken over.

Right, but to be super clear, it's been an extraordinarily successful strategy being "anti-Elon".