Open source this, open source that

How about you open your code editor and build something yourself instead of demanding that a company give you all of the pieces you need?

So sick of the entitlement from some devs on here, most apps wouldn’t even get retained usage if you could clone Warpcast anyway

Enough.

/new-york by day 🗽 /latenightcrew by night :) Fan of eating tacos and bringing people together, often at the same time 🌮

Would agree with you if we were not talking about by far the most dominant client for a decentralized social protocol

Companies (rightfully) don’t want to compete with warpcast so we are not seeing adoption of alternative clients, which totally undermines key features of decentralized social

Warpcast being open source (even just as a reference) would help prevent a lot of expensive work from being duplicated and level up the average farcaster client standard

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

But switching costs are zero when you have a portable identity and social graph so theoretically if someone built a better client they could win, right?

What’s wrong with Opencast, Herocast, or any of the other open source Farcaster apps out there? Can’t devs just use those?

Switching costs are a whole different conversation imo. Cost to switch apps where you consume/create content is low but cost to switch apps that custody your fid (for sign in with farcaster) are very high right now - im working on something to fix this

Opencast and herocast are hobbyist efforts. Not realistic to expect them to compete on performance and ux against warpcast which has multiple staff level engineers working on it full time

For the record the main reason other apps aren’t winning is because they aren’t onboarding their own users imo. Trying to pry users away from warpcast is a losing battle because there isn’t really anything glaringly wrong with it to begin with

Nook is a decent reference but it’s basically not runnable and you have to keep in mind that a lot of the magic of warpcast is in the backend (algo/performance). Nook is basically a neynar client and gets you 80% there (like most alt clients) that last 20% makes all the difference

Do you really think that the reason other apps can’t win is because users need to use WC to sign into apps? Who cares which app custodies your FID in most cases? You can also directly sign up new users within your own app (Supercast does this)

Also what about Nook? That’s an excellent open source Farcaster codebase that’s freely available for anyone to use