removing the cost for real users to join and contribute to the network is an existential problem farcaster needs to solve

most people don't pay for social media - doesn't matter if it's $1 or $10 - it's not something they're used to

this is also an existential problem for apps building on farcaster

If you remove cost, you have infinite spam.

If you gate sign ups, it's not permissionless.

Warpcast has tried a couple of large, reasonably scaled experiments with free sign ups and the long term retention rate is basically 0.

You can have both via fee waiving programs

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1. Who gets into the program?

2. What happens when someone is onboarding spam defined by Client A but they don't think it's spam?

3. If onboarding fee was the most important thing, I would expect a read-only client would have done well. The existential issue is increasing the supply of quality content. Content comes for 1% of users, so for every 99 sign ups, you get one potential person.

1. could do phone numbers, like warpcast did for a while iirc?

2. define a set of rules to start and adjust them as required

3. farcaster apps can't "do well" yet, too few people care about farcaster

1. Outside of the US, phone numbers are super easy to spin up and get around Twilio VOIP detection. We experienced this at-scale at Coinbase and again when we tried with free phone number sign ups in Q1.

2. I suspect this sounds much easier than it would be in practice. People would flip out if we kicked them out of the program.