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?

decentralization just is a means to an end. it basically does not matter if the protocol is decentralized if there is only one dominant client

furthermore, there is very little incentive for a dominant client to give up market share once it captures the market

we should be aiming to build credibly neutral platforms where incentives between users, developers, and platforms are aligned. if we're not doing that then we may as well be using centralized social platforms instead of replaying the same movie we've seen the ending of a dozen times already

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

23. Co-founder of @beliefs (beliefs.social). Collaborator at /frogfm.

While I agree the warpcast moats should be commoditised, building a client is the easy part relative to getting people to use it

The much bigger problem is that there is no incentive to compete with warpcast or grow the protocol if you’re not merkle

all the warpcast features have to be modularized in form of sdks to be plug-and-codeable for all the other app clients to let them focus on experimenting on new ways to attract users, extracting better social value from hubs instead of reimplementing features warpcast has

co founder of @metamask . Making computers behave for us.

What's interesting is that as a rallying cry, what you're saying is close to original cyppherpunk ethics, let's say.

But products expousing these ethics will only win if consumers choose them. And so these ethics will only survive in so far as they become effective memes that consumers demand.

It may turn out that ethics don't matter if they're not memetically virile. Espousing or even embodying ethics without popularizing them may also be a tragic fail during a time we've never been more capable of measuring our own impacts.

I treasure your attempts to articulate your vision of decentralization, thank you for sharing. I think your general diagnosis is right, and popularizing a solution is our challenging prompt.