Dan Romero on Farcaster

Dan Romero pfp

What's on your mind re: Farcaster? Feels like there's been a subtle uptick in negativity recently directed at a variety of people / teams. I'd rather that be directed my way. Curious to hear what people are frustrated with in the replies. Will only ask clarifying questions, i.e. no arguing or defending or telling you that you're wrong. And then I'll do a video response in a few days sharing our latest thinking based on any common themes.

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Cameron Armstrong pfp

Cameron Armstrong

Observation (not judgment or accusation) about my FC behavior: My reach, engagement, and quality of interaction here feels down bad from the earlier days of FC. My feed itself has shifted to a hodgepodge of stuff that for whatever reason rarely makes me stop my scroll. A lot of my early friends from FC feel much less active or fully inactive these days. As a result of these 3 things, I don't really even enjoy opening the app anymore. That said, I still check it every day. You know how much of a casting addict I used to be, but now I feel like I mostly cast as a hedge on if/when Farcaster starts growing again. I've tried to figure out whether it's a reduction in meaningful conversation, a shift from a relationship platform to a broadcast platform, or if the topics people want to converse about just aren't up my alley, but honestly I'm not sure. I don't want this to be my attitude, but transparently this is pretty much where I'm at rn.

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downshift 🫴🪵🔥 pfp

downshift 🫴🪵🔥

from my own interactions on X, it seems a lot of people formed opinions about fc from the frames launch + degen farming era and have not updated priors have recently heard: it still being called a "casino", complaining about Power Badges and the way Merkle + OGs weren't welcoming to newcomers (all of which has changed) not sure what is to be done about it, but just letting you know

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kugusha 🦋 pfp

No frustration, but an observation. If I spend some time on X, I often follow new people. I can’t remember last time I followed someone new on FC

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Tayyab - d/acc pfp

I miss thinking about Farcaster as a protocol. Which was what got me excited because I saw so many possibilities of what could be (understand that promise != reality). Now I think of Farcaster as mostly Warpcast with an open social graph. (Which I don’t think is evil, but vibe shifty) I also understand the need for growth in DAU, which yes I agree is still the most important thing. And this is likely because I’m the early adopter crowd that came in for principles, does not mean that the next cohort will. Just food for thought. FWIW, I’m not negative on Farcaster/Warpcast/Merkle. But things are different from 2-3 years ago.

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Pichi pfp

Shadow bans and power badges left a bad taste. A lot of non native English speakers left and are hard to lure back. The spam labels aren’t helping. Without clean definitions of what’s “spammy” and no transparency into what labels we’ve been given by the team and algo, a lot of people don’t have the energy to try to figure out the unwritten rules to make it here.

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patxol pfp

I think the global downtrend in DAU and the uptrend in memecoins has put everyone who’s here for qualitative interaction down. I am not sure if this is a Farcaster problem or a broader issue with the crypto space though.

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Ghostlinkz pfp

@ghostlinkz.eth

Some thoughts: 1) If Warpcast or Neynar go offline, all other clients stop working. This makes it feel less like a protocol 2) Doesn’t feel good to see most value being extracted from memecoins instead of clients and channels. Narrative seems to be that if you don’t launch a token or speculate on tokens, you’re going to have a hard time thriving on FC 3) I don’t like being punished for having many followers that are dormant which came as a result of being on the autofollow list. The worst part is there’s no way for me to manually clean things up if I was willing to take the time to do so 4) Devs building new FC apps that can independently onboard users is a better way to grow than the reward program/leaderboard. Since devs are saying they want more users before they invest time and money to build new apps, why not create a fund to encourage them to build now instead of later

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erik pfp

It seems like Bluesky has been able to capture some of the marketshare of various communities leaving Twitter (tech and urbanism Twitter are the two I’m privy to). Have you thought about why Bluesky was successful in attracting these users and what Farcaster could learn from it?

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Roberto Bayardo 🎩 pfp

Roberto Bayardo 🎩

No deep frustration, but it does seem any reply to a cast is basically invisible to everyone but the OP, and only then if they check their notifications.

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JR ↑ pfp

I see good apps, token projects get started here but they start to move out to target users - not to bring them here but to get to a meaninful user base. I hardly ever see any interesting new faces or generally discussions anymore and find it weird no core team is seemingly grinding to bring new users here or making prev users come back. Just talked today with a friend about my prev startups hustling for users, customers, about social medias like Facebook onboarding specific target segments, university clusters, friends groups and here I’ve spent 100$ to get a couple of friends an account yet there’s not 1 well-run channel they could check out nor a team focused on growth. 3rd party builders are onboarded and taking on that job (good! Well done on network effects) but I wouldn’t recommend anyone doing that anymore because they literally lose users onboarding to warpcast vs simply bringing them into their own app without extra steps and unnecessary friction.

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↑langchain 🎩 pfp

↑langchain 🎩

IMO need some dedicated advocacy or support to migrate some defi stuff that hit PMF to support/leverage FC. Even if it’s just for top of funnel activation, I think many are missing the value add and assume “CT TAM bigger thus better” Not really a beef tho and I could be wrong that it is important

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Cyber Shakti 🎩😇😈💃 pfp

Cyber Shakti 🎩😇😈💃

Is creating channels not permissionless right now?

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Leo 🪴🎩 pfp

I am concerned about not having an effective feedback channel and not being able to see the progress of the process. https://warpcast.com/sha25leo.eth/0xffb3732d

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phil pfp

haven't seen the negativity fwiw frames v2 seem really interesting. what is your perspective on how the launch went and what the immediate priorities are?

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Danica Swanson pfp

1) Great threads seem to get buried and forgotten too quickly. I miss reply-bumping. Would love to see curated "best of" lists and other ways of resurfacing deep-dive ongoing convos. 2) There are few clear paths to a sustainable livelihood in the Farconomy for content creators, channel mods, + community-builders. (This is more of a general FC-wide ecosystem thing). I wrote a bit about this the other day, after reading a great thread in which you wrote that FC is working on its value prop. https://deepworth.notion.site/Farcaster-s-Value-Prop-Great-Conversations-172888da844f80f1b07cc067ab66bd76

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Thibauld pfp

My other feeling is that farcaster has an extraordinary opportunity to become the social layer for crypto wallets (instead of trying to become the wallet-friendly social network). I laid down that vision to @jessepollak here: https://warpcast.com/thibauld/0x88d14f70 A quick perplexity search says there are 562M crypto wallet owners in the world (6.8% of the global population). Instead of trying to integrate with 3rd party wallets, make warpcast super easy to integrate "into" crypto wallets. Such a move would 100% leverage farcaster / warpcast strengths (the most crypto integrated / friendly / aligned social network) while giving it a tremendous distribution channel. I don't know what @sid and @jessepollak think about this but adding a compelling social layer directly into coinbase wallet would add incredible value to users and will give a tremendous avenue for onchain apps and their builders to go viral. Crypto wallets are at the infrastructure layer, not the app layer.

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matthewb pfp

imo this negativity is not really FC/WC/MM related, but rather market conditions since the local top mid-december.

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Joshua Fisher ⌐◨-◨ pfp

Joshua Fisher ⌐◨-◨

@joshuafisher.eth

fwiw I’m trying to rally people around an idea but not sure how to continue the convo because answers to responses don’t exactly thread together…I know others have discussed. Other than smallish ui upgrades I can’t lie, I love FC and WC and @anonworld and all the other really exciting things being built around it. Hoping credentialed Anon posting can help to weave through general grumbling from rando’s and legitimate complaints from users

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𒂭_𒂭 pfp

on a positive note, I think Frames v2 is very solid, very performant, and the proper amount of noise. personally, I'm really frustrated that on July 13th, there really isn't a newsfeed. same with how Grok works for the wildfires, even forgetting the drop in effort to comment on procedural secondary content, there's a practical application right there for crypto to save lives and property. not anyone's fault, but I think about all the engagement from July till now.

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