zach on Nostr: Yes, I've spent a lot of time digging into Farcaster. Here are some of my thoughts: ...
Yes, I've spent a lot of time digging into Farcaster. Here are some of my thoughts:
1. Right now I'd argue that the content on Farcaster is more appealing to most ppl than the content on Nostr. It is much more of a techno-optimist/VC crowd with some Ethereum discussion sprinkled in while Nostr is 90%+ Bitcoin-focused discussions with some derision toward those that don't fall in line with the laser-eye-maxi worldview.
2. They have a few clear short-term advantages, mainly that Warpcast (the main Farcaster client and also the team developing the Farcaster "protocol") raised 30m from a16z back in 2021 and recently raised more from Paradigm valuing their company over 1B.
This allows them to have a cracked dev team of engineers creating the most Twitter-like mobile and desktop experience possible. When using their app, you never run into issues like profiles failing to load, threads not showing up correctly, or missing notes from ppl you follow (all issues that while we're improving, are still commonplace on most Nostr clients).
3. "Protocol"-level advantages. I put the word protocol in quotes because it is a bit of a stretch to call it that. The official Farcaster GitHub has 20 contributors last I'd check and essentially no community discussion or PRs to speak of. The Warpcast team is what drives this ship and that leads to well-thought-out and robustly implemented features when they are added. One of the specific protocol-level advantages that they have for now (this will bite them in the ass at some point) is that all "Hubs" (their version of relays) must have a full global state and be in consensus with all other hubs. This allows performance to end up being much better for the average user. No connecting to 20 different relays to find a note. Just make HTTP requests to warpcasts cached servers and you get all the data you can possibly need quickly and simply. For the end user, this translates to an identical experience to Twitter and aligns with what most tech-ppl expect to interact with in 2024. Obviously, there are HUGE flaws with this kind of model and I'm very skeptical of how it will scale once its centralization is tested, but, for now, I'm just going to focus on the reason why I believe Farcaster has gained popularity recently.
4. Now on to the shit-coinery. Yes, there is a Warpcast token called "Warps" and I believe that there is some utility within the Warpcast client (like creating custom channels) but not at a protocol level itself. Apparently, a bunch of early Farcaster users were airdropped a bunch of this stuff and made a killing, so it's fair to say that some users are there with the hopes of making a bag from an air-drop down the line. With that being said, I think it's cope for us on Nostr to say "They're just on Farcaster for the token" since there is clearly real interest and discussion going on there.
5. We should give them credit for a few things that they have done well. It's clear that their "Frames" product has been received well by users and is a legitimately innovative concept to add to a social platform. I also think some of their account abstraction stuff is pretty cool in that the private key you use to log into clients isn't the same as your core account private key, so if a client ever rugs, you aren't totally screwed.
This podcast will give you a good primer on how things work in Farcaster land and how they think about the space as a whole:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlF2mpMSmro
1. Right now I'd argue that the content on Farcaster is more appealing to most ppl than the content on Nostr. It is much more of a techno-optimist/VC crowd with some Ethereum discussion sprinkled in while Nostr is 90%+ Bitcoin-focused discussions with some derision toward those that don't fall in line with the laser-eye-maxi worldview.
2. They have a few clear short-term advantages, mainly that Warpcast (the main Farcaster client and also the team developing the Farcaster "protocol") raised 30m from a16z back in 2021 and recently raised more from Paradigm valuing their company over 1B.
This allows them to have a cracked dev team of engineers creating the most Twitter-like mobile and desktop experience possible. When using their app, you never run into issues like profiles failing to load, threads not showing up correctly, or missing notes from ppl you follow (all issues that while we're improving, are still commonplace on most Nostr clients).
3. "Protocol"-level advantages. I put the word protocol in quotes because it is a bit of a stretch to call it that. The official Farcaster GitHub has 20 contributors last I'd check and essentially no community discussion or PRs to speak of. The Warpcast team is what drives this ship and that leads to well-thought-out and robustly implemented features when they are added. One of the specific protocol-level advantages that they have for now (this will bite them in the ass at some point) is that all "Hubs" (their version of relays) must have a full global state and be in consensus with all other hubs. This allows performance to end up being much better for the average user. No connecting to 20 different relays to find a note. Just make HTTP requests to warpcasts cached servers and you get all the data you can possibly need quickly and simply. For the end user, this translates to an identical experience to Twitter and aligns with what most tech-ppl expect to interact with in 2024. Obviously, there are HUGE flaws with this kind of model and I'm very skeptical of how it will scale once its centralization is tested, but, for now, I'm just going to focus on the reason why I believe Farcaster has gained popularity recently.
4. Now on to the shit-coinery. Yes, there is a Warpcast token called "Warps" and I believe that there is some utility within the Warpcast client (like creating custom channels) but not at a protocol level itself. Apparently, a bunch of early Farcaster users were airdropped a bunch of this stuff and made a killing, so it's fair to say that some users are there with the hopes of making a bag from an air-drop down the line. With that being said, I think it's cope for us on Nostr to say "They're just on Farcaster for the token" since there is clearly real interest and discussion going on there.
5. We should give them credit for a few things that they have done well. It's clear that their "Frames" product has been received well by users and is a legitimately innovative concept to add to a social platform. I also think some of their account abstraction stuff is pretty cool in that the private key you use to log into clients isn't the same as your core account private key, so if a client ever rugs, you aren't totally screwed.
This podcast will give you a good primer on how things work in Farcaster land and how they think about the space as a whole:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlF2mpMSmro