David Furlong (df)

a Farcaster who likes this cast today will get a mystery surprise

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Wrote my take on the state of Farcaster and decentralized social, including learnings from years building here https://x.com/davidvfurlong/status/2015858559792382458

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The Merkle team repeatedly showed contempt for third-party developers who believed they were building on a neutral protocol. In reality, it was the standard Silicon Valley platform playbook: call it “sufficiently decentralized,” while keeping the meaningful leverage centralized. The pattern looked like this: “We’ll label this a decentralized protocol, but you can’t run a node, pay a service provider instead.” “We'll open-source the app… (a year later, no open sourcing)” And a bunch of similar reversals and constraints that all point the same direction. I’ve been giving the Neynar team time to enact what they want post-acquisition (they’re likely swamped with new responsibilities and infra to maintain) before deciding how I interpret their intentions toward third-party developers like myself. It mostly looks like business as usual: a shift in focus toward mini-app/agent developers, not a move toward stronger protocol guarantees or developer neutrality (though decentralizing channels is at least a step in the right direction, and so is reinstating third party dev calls). My jury is still out - I'm giving them a bit of time to find their feet. On Cassie’s fork: I support experimentation, and I support the right to fork; especially as a form of dissent against platforms that market themselves as protocols to win developer goodwill. I genuinely hope this fork contributes to making Farcaster a fairer place for any developer to build on, and I'll try any app that uses it.

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if only I'd worked at coinbase... I'd have the experience of having built at scale... I'd actually have valid ideas.... *checks notes* like pivoting out of integrating Farcaster?

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