patxol 🔷 anser.social on Warpcast

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David Furlong pfp

The Farcaster protocol does very little today in the way of solving conflicts or UX problems around multiple competing clients; which, one might expect, is the hard & important thing to solve in a social protocol. Farcaster is being controlled & governed by the 99% client (Warpcast), repeatedly making choices that limit the ability of alternate clients to build and compete (See SIWF, Messaging, Channels). As a builder, it's unclear why Farcaster is not any different from early Twitter, which was open, had alt clients, but one overwhelmingly dominant client. Once Twitter became big enough, it shifted from attracting to extracting, and shut down their API, becoming the Twitter of today, ruled by a benevolent dictator. Is Farcaster/Warpcast just running back the Twitter playbook? Why should we users and builders trust Warpcast's continued benevolence, when their short term choices are already showing a willingness to compromise on the Protocol part in the name of monoclient growth?

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woj pfp

there is a lot of other projects that put decentralization and open access on the first spot, but farcaster / warpcast proved to be the most useful to build on top of > Why should we users and builders trust Warpcast's continued benevolence... warpcast never did anything malicious, all the problems can be attributed to priorities — if merkle had an infinite dev hours at disposal today, i don't see a part of the roadmap that is killing supercast

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boscolo.eth pfp

IMO, it's not just about benevolence / maliciousness. It's about allowing more experimentation across the stack. Watching Bluesky grow 20x more than Farcaster on the same time horizon, I can't help but wonder if Farcaster would have seen similar growth had MM also adopted an open sourced everything mindset.

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woj pfp

bluesky grew through capturing 1% of users who really really hate the owner of the other social platform, i doubt it’s a scalable growth tactic also yeah i’m pro experimentation and i’d love merkle to do more of it on all layers — to their credit they shipped location inside protocol recently and supercast will use it for a new feature this week

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patxol 🔷 anser.social pfp

patxol 🔷 anser.social

Bluesky is still growing, with real users, less cash, and already by far bigger than Farcaster. All brands are settling there, along with their community. People would not have that fear around decentralised vs centralised if the growth and retention figures - Driven by Warpcast - were encouraging IMO. But bringing farmers and AI bots is not a scalable growth tactic that will attract long term users to Farcaster. Once the economic incentives will be gone, they will leave elsewhere. It’s sad because there are many great builders here.

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