dfern.eth on Farcaster

Daniel Fernandes pfp

Daniel Fernandes

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

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Dan Romero pfp

> 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).

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Daniel Fernandes pfp

Daniel Fernandes

I blame Claude for that bulletpoint, jk jk. In all seriousness, I agree, y'all did actually do the thing, and I probably should have mentioned that, because I remember it well: cozy corners, find your tribe, URL to IRL etc. (I feel the messaging kinda worked b/c I have a hunch Rose at Bluesky started borrowing "cozy corners" from @ted, but I can't prove it.)

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ted (not lasso) pfp

ted (not lasso)

fwiw, couldn't agree more with dan. sad, but true. 1. i spent most of last year experimenting with URL to IRL and social connection; it doesn't scale OR you need an entire product team focused on it (think 222, rodeo, timeleft, partiful or luma, etc.) and even then it is still a HUGE risk with slow growth. 2. farcaster is mostly crypto users and has crypto primitives (wallet, coins), but the average person doesn't want to hang out on a crypto social network so >half the existing content and exciting features don't make sense to them. this impacts user acquisition and drives churn. 3. rewarding content with $$ is simply not sufficient to attract new users and have them retain at scale; this was immediately obvious after onboarding the journalists or college students and experimenting with the creator rewards. increasing rewards, improving video UX, etc. was never going to change that. 4. my creator/user onboarding was hand-to-hand combat and the common denominator across the most successful onboarded users was the effort or attention dan, linda or i gave to the relationship; again, not scaleable. leaning into the wallet and tokens is the single greatest decision farcaster has made (outside of its permissionless primitives) to support growth and i fully endorse it, even if it isn't the vision i initially signed up for. in fact, i wish the decision to let go of creators / content / connection and instead lean into crypto happened sooner.

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Daniel Fernandes pfp

Daniel Fernandes

Thanks for the detailed retrospective! I think we're starting to tease out the diff between "What's good for Merkle's success?" & "What's abstractly good for FC as a social network?" Same problem with Ethereum & the EF. Not trying to be cynical, but it's okay to acknowledge the delta between stated vs revealed preferences here. Everyone wants the utopian Twitter killer w/ 0 UX friction powered by rainbows and unicorn farts...too few are willing to pay enough for it, too few are willing to give up their Twitter fame for 'moar cypherpunk'. Substack is learning this too. OTOH, one of Bluesky's mottos that I like is "the company is a future adversary," and 4.5 years in: I think everyone on here needs to do a little more introspection on how Merkle, the protocol, & the community are going to align long term more than just vibes and reputation. This includes: what can the community do to give Merkle/Neynar more skin-in-the-game. Not a unique problem; nobody has figured this out yet! At least we have a lot of web3 magic in the toolbox that has yet to be tested & that is more than just trustmebro alignment. Again, I'm not saying "let's be cynical", I'm saying "let's honestly calculate everyone's long term trade-off matrix, including altruism/reputation/goodwill/cashflows as factors."

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