Farcaster

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?

the only viable fix for this existential ecosystem problem is the immediate announcement of 1) open sourcing warpcast and 2) 20+ million in grants for ecosystem devs over the next 5y

it would be cheap and easy for Merkle to announce this with no delay and it would earn them an undisputed position as the king of web3 social

no i will not be taking questions, yes i am available for the position of lead devrel and contrarian shitposter in chief

Full-stack digital product consultant @ BoundCorp.net - Regenfrogs.xyz - goldmongers.xyz - Reno NV

I like the idea of sizeable grants but grants don’t help with fixing misaligned incentives

Kind of feel like merkle should invest in companies building alt clients or even spin out an alt client company themselves

cypherpunk wannabe, engineer working on @frames /open-frames /opencast
https://stephancill.co.za create stories at https://stories.steer.fun

that's 100% in line with my intended suggestion here, with a 200m warchest they should be funding 2 or 3 more major clients (angel funding, no equity or strings attached) with millions each - and that's still deeply insufficient if WC maintains a feature moat, closed DMs, closed channels, etc