Farcaster

Warpcast *is* the app. 

There aren’t going to be lots of popular interfaces. 

Power laws still apply. 

All the important engagement mechanics happen in the UI.

solidity & product. i interview crypto builders @ web3galaxybrain.com

The permissionless Farcaster API will be useful for specialized applications, but there won’t be more than a handful of relevant general purpose frontends and Warpcast will be the biggest.

This logic would say that Apple’s first party apps would automatically win.

How’d WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Signal do it?

For one, Apple's first party apps are limited to <30% of the global population. The functionality is historically very limited (especially relative to the timeline competitors released features).

As long as there's strong vacuums for competitors to fill, we should get competing clients. But also easy to sabotage.

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

iOS represents a large majority of $ on mobile, though.

Don't think messaging apps like iMessage/Whatsapp/Signal and their consumers care how much margin iOS makes?

From a consumer perspective, I don't think users care if Farcaster as a protocol is making more or less money than Twitter or Facebook as a platform.

In a rational world, consumers might *prefer* that their platform of choice is *least* extractive of them, not most. But not sure that's material in our current world.

Meta, sure. Though that wasn't in the cards in 2014 when they bought WhatsApp (wasn't that prohibited by the terms of the merger?). Don't think iMessage and Signal are doing ads anytime soon.

But that's also the difference between protocols and apps: Protocols can grow without scaling profit, centralized apps don't.

WhatsApp and the rest of the Meta messaging apps as well as Snap all care about how wealthy the end user is for ad monetization.

Why Snap shut down Zenly, etc.