Laurens on Warpcast

Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Truly remarkable how despite steady growth Farcaster always gets left out of commentary like this. There is a genuine parallel universe invisibility effect beyond the cryptowall. I don’t think this is a problem to be solved. Rather, it’s a regime boundary to be respected and understood. Just as you think of your insurance spending and regular consumption spending in separate buckets, your social media attention budget has separate buckets. Your financial budget has buckets: Tax, retirement savings (including equity part of mortgage), insurance, emergency liquidity, and consumption. Your attention budget has analogous buckets. Tax = news. Retirement savings = learning. Insurance = Censorship resistant media use. Emergency liquidity = email/slack/zoom other work channels. Consumption = regular infotainment media, including social.

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Dan Romero pfp

Mood affiliation. All crypto bad.

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Laurens pfp

dont think its only that. i keep a pretty close tabs on different communities in the ecosystems for my writing. the type of crypto positive people that i do see (some on bsky, lots on nostr) is that its the type that is very distrustful of anything that reeks too much of centralisation

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Dan Romero pfp

Hmm, I've been following Farcaster mentions on both platforms for years and most common response on both platforms to any mention of Farcaster is that it's inherently scammy (Bsky because cryptocurrency, Nostr because non-Bitcoin).

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

That's your problem. You're following the *mentions*

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Dan Romero pfp

Not really. If you search Farcaster on BlueSky or Nostr, there's a small percent of open-minded people discussing (often Farcaster users using the other platforms) and the replies, esp. for larger accounts are almost always universally negative. fwiw, I do this for Twitter as well. Sentiment for crypto twitter people not active on farcaster today is almost as negative (and they are crypto people). Bsky last fundraise pitch deck thew shade at Farcaster (from what I've heard).

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

You’re not getting my point My point is it’s usually not even in the conversation when social media broadly is being discussed. Neither is Nostr. There are a million conversations that go something like “which is best alt to twitter? Mastodon, threads, or bluesky?” Even substack is more likely to be included in the set. I think it’s fine to not be in those conversations because I don’t think farcaster is social media per se. It’s not in that set. But others might think it ought to be.

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Dan Romero pfp

Got it. I don't think being in those conversations is important. We're tied to crypto, which post-FTX / bear market is deeply uncool again, so any effort to increase our mainstream media coverage (how to get in those conversations), would be a waste. The fundamental bet with Farcaster is crypto continues to seep into everything. If correct, the decentralized social network protocol that's tightly coupled to crypto rides that tailwind. If you don't want to make that bet, then federated model way easier to do. But unlikely to be a venture-scale business imo (since Twitter-style apps monetization is terrible and all of the fragmentation will mean sub-scale DAUs, further worsening ARPU).

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

This makes sense and suggests that the actual conversation you want to be in is when signal, telegram, discord are being talked about. You’re usually not in those conversations either but closer to getting there. One priority to signal intentions there might be to nail decentralized protocol level e2ee direct casts solidly even if main product thrust is more open conversations

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Dan Romero pfp

Yeah, I think we're focused on getting a social primitive that drives growth. Twitter clone is not sufficient. Most likely path is channels.

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Laurens pfp

i think a channels-like "something" is the most likely direction yeah. i dont think any of the 4 protocols (ap, at, nostr, fc) have figured it out yet, and that fc is currently the furthers along, mainly due to having good automod tools but i also think itll take all protocols a few iterations to get there

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Laurens pfp

whatever that "there" may actually be. probably more in the direction of discord/telegram channels than the direction of a twitter-like, but thats a hunch i have

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