Farcaster

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

this is really funny but i do think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding between those who hold web3 values higher than execution values. 

both are important, but just think about how different the DeFi revolution would have been if Uniswap had not open sourced the V2 frontend. DeFi likely would have moved a lot slower. 

good or bad, it’s important to recognize the value difference here and to see the irony of claiming web3 values while executing under web2 values. 

i personally hold no judgement for those executing under web2 values, but if you do that, you might as well be open about it.

/bettik founder /outercorps stalwart | ex-binance, ex-celsiusX

Great points, appreciate you writing up this! Doesn’t feel like Merkle ever said that Warpcast is anything but a for-profit, closed-source client while the Farcaster protocol is completely open and permissionless

I think we’re past the point of them needing to open source WC anyway given how much the builder community here has stepped up and created resources (Neynar, Pinata, Opencast, Herocast, Litecast, Nook, etc.)

Now it just feels like a few devs who are coping and demanding that everything be OS which feels unreasonable to me, it’s really not that hard to build on Farcaster imo, the pieces are all there, up to builders to assemble them and create some valuable

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

Disagree on “open source would’ve led to more distributed market share” tbh, what’s so hard about building on FC? Hubs have accessible and well-documented APIs and there are even publicly available hubs to get started

Farcaster has always been “sufficiently decentralized” which means that they’re focused on balancing being open and permissionless yet can still move quickly without the baggage (politics, ideology, etc) of full decentralization (right approach imo)

What else do you need besides open ways to create accounts and read and write data to and from the protocol? Hubs aren’t perfect (everything is a tradeoff) but federation also has its issues (@dwr.eth has written at length about them)

What part of protocol development isn’t a community endeavor? They’ve been clear about moving ahead with “rough consensus and running code” and all discussions and decisions (code) happen in a public GitHub repo (it would be great to have more community-driven FIPs but they take a lot of work)

i agree with your building argument, at this point open sourcing wc wouldn’t make that much of a difference although i do believe if they had open sourced it from the beginning, by now we would have many more clients and a somewhat more distributed market share among them. 

i also agree that wc/merkle is clearly a for-profit venture, which is their right to pursue, but if the only decentralized aspect here is that the data is distributed, but development and core features are not, i don’t see the point in pursuing the hub model. if the reality is *only* open data, just do a federated model - it’s much cheaper and scalable anyway. 

if a protocol wants to pursue a decentralized vision, there are much more holistic and long-term sustainable ways to do that, whether making all protocol development a community endeavor or merely making the base protocol turing complete so that network features are fully decentralized (the evm model is a great example of this last option)