Matthew on Warpcast

Dan Romero pfp

How decentralized is Farcaster today? Sign ups - You can sign up permissionlessly with the smart contract as a developer - You can sign up with Supercast, Herocast, Farquest (and maybe others...) Data / APIs - You can permissionlessly run a Hub - There are thousands of independently run Hubs - If you don't want to run a Hub, you can use an infra provider like Neynar or Airstack Protocol vs. non-protocol features - Casts, reactions, follows, profiles, verifications are all on Hubs - Not on Hubs: channel metadata, settings and follows, direct casts, location in user profiles If Warpcast labels me as spammy, is that censorship? - Depends on your definition! If you have an existing audience — say 10K followers — then even if you get labeled spammy your existing your followers will see your content in feeds on Warpcast regardless of whether you use Warpcast or not.. - If you don't care about Warpcast (approximately 80% of signer activity), then your follow graph is already decentralized in the procol.

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Dan Romero pfp

What's the most credible argument that Farcaster is de facto centralized? - Most people sign up with Warpcast - If you don't sign up with Warpcast, you can't import your account into Warpcast to access direct casts - Direct casts are drive retention, so without access to direct casts your client will struggle relative to Warpcast - Most people use Warpcast, so if you get labeled as spammy then you will be practically invisible for discovery purposes - Warpcast team is primary developer of Hubble (the main implemention of Hubs) and has GitHub control over smart contract repos; also controls storage fee multi-sig and ability to adjust prices

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Matthew pfp

re point #2, maybe I'm misreading but if I create a farcaster account on behalf of a user, they can't later import that fc account into warpcast?

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Dan Romero pfp

Correct. Requires some refactoring on our part. Not many people asking for it. So would be doing work that doesn't have a lot of TAM. Given growth is existential to solve right now, lower priority. What would convince us it's worth the effort *right now* (vs. in the future) is if a client was onboarding a bunch of high-quality creators indpt of Warpcast.

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