Thanks to Claude again for organizing my braindump into an article.

If you hate the new wallet emphasis, this blog's for you.

If you love the new wallet emphasis, you can show me who's boss by buying $dfern.

Either way: clank clank.

Farcaster's Growing Pains: The Delicate Balance Between Crypto Innovation and Mass Appeal

Software Engineer @ Cadence Design Systems. B4: Stanford EE / Illinois ECE

dfern

“There's an old trap in startup thinking: ‘We need to do something; this is something; therefore we should do it.’ But Farcaster hasn't really fallen into that trap”

Looks like it's caught in a ‘We need to do something that makes numbers go up quickly; this is something that makes numbers go up quickly; therefore we should do it’ trap, though.

A Farcaster native client.
Available for iOS & Android.

Join /recaster to get more info!

Built by @haole · recaster.org

azbest

Somewhat, but I also agree with @barmstrong's idea that "action leads to information", as a startup your advantage is being able to move fast and try things in a quick feedback loop. I'd rather see Farcaster make enough ARR to be sustainable (& Clanker seems to have the juice) than to be so "pure" we end up like Mastodon.

I agree it's possible to run too much of a 'greedy optimizer' and reach a local maxima when there's a bigger hill to climb that requires going through the valley of despair. But we can run both experiments in parallel with multiple clients, see @recaster-fc wanting to emphasis more on social exclusively.

Can you really do that, though? It's like operating a vegan restaurant and steakhouse under one roof; the two concepts work against each other, which affects the environment you're creating. If you go full steakhouse, then it’s unlikely you’ll appeal to many vegans just because there’s a table where they can bring their salad. It’s not about purity, but rather about finding a middle ground where you build an environment that's appealing to various groups. That's obviously not easy, but it seems like the problem here is rooted in something other than the inherent impossibility of the task.

Yes, if everyone has to coexist on the same feed and vye for attention. I think we should embrace orthogonal feeds and filters that allow for "no crypto", "only crypto" and everything in between.

The problem is that you need something to filter from. If the main forces driving the protocol are determined to turn it into some sort of social wallet, then you’ll have a big problem with that as you’re up against a very peculiar userbase. Sure, some shitcoins traders may have interesting insights about matters that are not strictly related to shitcoins, but that’s probably not a very large group…

I agree, if my feed becomes shitcoin shilling & bot generated garbage, I will be very loud about voicing my displeasure. It's why I found Lens to be crap and didn't have much patience for it. But here's the thing, our experience here is shaped by cryptotwitter, youtube comments, etc. Platforms who have 0 real tools to deal with spam. Farcaster actually has some of the best tools because it's been fighting with airdrop/bot farmers from day 0. I almost never see spam in my feed, follow notifs, or as a non-hidden reply. Can't say this about X, Bluesky, etc. (Base App does seem to have follower spam issues ATM)

So yes, one of the top priorities with this new wallet strategy should be nuking bad faith "hey guys checkout fartcoin, I think this one could be big" with extreme prejudice. But again, it's Twitter that produced the memecoin meta as a byproduct of how easily manipulated it was.

It's also on us users to not follow/unfollow low quality accounts so that they don't make their way into the discovery feed. Ofc, one's personal 'following' feed is always going to be "skill issue if it sucks for you."

I mean, it should be peculiar, but in a sense of ‘wow, that’s really something else’, not ‘wow, that’s really degenerate’. I think the fundamental problem here is the mindset/culture that prioritizes financial incentives and cool tech as the primary drivers of growth, while neglecting the factors that exert far more influence on how people actually behave. Which is a bit unfortunate if you’re (or were) trying to build a *social* network… 

There's also a first impression issue. I probably won’t be turned off by random food photos despite not finding them particularly interesting, if the platform overall seems promising. But it's a different story when my initial impression is that it's mostly shilling, questionable activity, or something that just feels completely out of touch.

I do share the "peculiar userbase" concern. But to be fair isn't every social media network peculiar in their own way? Twitter started off with a user base in SF posting about their lunch. Today, I still complain that Twitter is too SF Centric. (And it's not like cryptotwitter shitcoining drives other users off the platform, so it's just empirically true that multiple Vibes can exist.)
At the worst, you have shitcoin traders, at the best, you build something like Bloomberg Terminal  Chat where you have ppl that trend towards crypto/cypherpunk values, skin-in-the-game, prediction markets, futarchy...and becomes more "real world" as RWA adoption increases.
Imagine the next US presidential election with the prediction market built into the client. Even Twitter is trying to partner with Polymarket now.