Farcaster

1/ Farcaster is permissionless. 

Anyone or anything can pay $3 worth of ETH to the smart contract on OP Mainnet to create an account.

After 1 year, the account has to pay $3 again to keep using the protocol.

There will be low quality stuff on the protocol! Just like the web and email.

Clients will solve quality.

how will we know when to pay? 
i have never paid for my account so I don't know how or where to do it

You'll get a notification. Everyone in the beta got the first year for free.

~310K paid sign ups since October (and additional 50K storage units sold for accounts that want more space on Hubs)