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

> Lead with social connection, not financial speculation in its public messaging

We tried this for 4.5 years. We saturated the market for people interested in this and aren’t specifically focused on political affiliation.

My push to you: the network is permissionless. If the opportunity for all social no crypto is so obvious, why isn’t someone building that client?

Additionally, I think it’s easy to say you should go after X or Y group of people. Much harder to actually spend the time trying to convince them only to have them tell you why they aren’t interested (or onboard and then just churn).

> My push to you: the network is permissionless. If the opportunity for all social no crypto is so obvious, why isn’t someone building that client?

I suspect the builders that feel this way are building on the other permissionless network. fwiw, there are some crypto experiments going on there. Seems like morphing the Farcaster protocol to ride on AT Protocol would be an easy way to let MM focus on crypto and not have to also build a new protocol.

> fwiw, there are some crypto experiments going on there

Experiments, but no funded companies and they are even farther away from Crypto Twitter than Farcaster is.

I'll update my priors on AT Proto once they have multiple well-funded businesses building on it. 

Right now it's the core team +hobbyists.

The political / anti-capitalist nature of the core network is super polarizing for regular entrepreneurs.

None of that matters, you’d be bringing all the Farcaster users with you.  But, the TAM for builders grows.

I highly doubt the number of new people interested would be worth the work.

We're indexed to crypto. If it wins, we have a good shot.

That’s one way to look at it.

Another way to look at it as you could be building on a protocol that will probably achieve IETF standardization, and you would be bringing the missing piece, (a censorship resistant identity layer) and native crypto support.

You still win if crypto wins.  And you open the door to winning evan if crypto doesn’t win.

Yeah sorry @boscolo.eth, I'll actually go one step further than dwr. I actually don't like how Bluesky plays this institutional capture game where they try to pander to bigwig media organizations like New York Times, Washington Post, WIRED, etc making them the preferred verifiers on the platform. Then they bend over backwards to comply with unconstitutional "child safety laws" instead of challenging them.

I feel that all the IETF/W3C/WHATWG stuff is in the same vein: more about winning brownie points for institutional legitimacy that has spurious correlation to serving the users. They will make a Swiss Consortium for did:PLC before even considering using a public blockchain which I think is just so ridiculous and/or actively malicious.

Institutional legitimacy is their primary currency...and it's the opposite in crypto. It's why they love DNS and we love ENS.

I agree it doesn’t matter directly to entrepreneurs, but it is evidence of a stable platform which entrepreneurs do you care about. How many developers aren’t building here because they view it as shifting sand?

> probably achieve IETF standardization

This does not matter to entrepreneurs. I understand it matters to a certain population of people. I have been / am more interested in building something entrepreneurs are excited about. Difference preferences are fine!