Dan Romero pfp
Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
1. Paying for storage is too much friction to onboard new users but not enough to slow down spam > We experimented with free sign ups in a number of countries and rentention was significantly lower than users who paid the $5 to sign up. 2. Hubs aren't going to scale 2 - 3 orders of magnitude without a significant change in architecture. > We've said from the beginning we think Hubs scale without sharding to ~10M daily active users, give or take. Scaling is hard, but the existential problem is getting the actual retained users. :) 3. The incentives to run a HUB are misaligned and causing congestion instead of capacity > There are no incentives? Adding incentives would increase the number of Hubs. The team is exploring how to reduce congestion. Possibly increasing economic cost of running a Hub (since access to the network is valuable). Nothing definitive yet. See also my cast below On Hubs: https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x2d7823b4
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Stephan pfp
Stephan
@stephancill
paying for storage isn't just too much friction, it's a non-starter for most mainstream users and also for apps building on farcaster who want to onboard users to the network i don't think the retention experiment proves much about the success of the storage model without more detail. when was this, how big was the network, what is the sample size, what were they interested in, why were they joining, were they in crypto or were they outsiders, the list goes on. i also don't think farcaster will get more than a few millions of users paying annually for storage (optimistically), which i would hope is much less than what farcaster is aiming for lately i have developed a strong opinion, which i hold loosely, that the cost derives from unnecessary data redundancy. if hubs didn't need to store all messages then storage costs would be a non-issue and we wouldn't even have to speculate on whether it's good or bad for the network
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Stephan pfp
Stephan
@stephancill
and i say all of this with great respect for you and the merkle team's pragmatism approaching this problem. you guys are a big reason why i believe in the potential of farcaster
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