Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Where is Farcaster still centralized? June 2025 edition Important to call out: our top priority remains user growth. Prematurely solving any of these potential issues below doesn’t help user growth in the near-term. So not a top a priority. May change in the future. 1. Most users use the Farcaster app. A nerf on Farcaster app is de facto censorship from the protocol today. This will change as Coinbase Wallet, Zapper, Uno and other clients come to market. 2. Snapchain write nodes are run by the Farcaster team and Neynar. In theory we can collude to censor additional writes to the protocol. Low likelihood, but possible. Way to solve this is increase number of write nodes. But again, not an issue today. 3. Farcaster “channels” — metadata and creation are centralized. Content has always been decentralized via FIP-2. Creation is not available via API but metadata is. Making some progress on a plan to move channels into FIP-2 without having reliance on the Farcaster app. 1/2
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
4. Direct casts run on a centralized server. We have APIs available for everything at this point. Documentation needs to be improved. Eventually move server to something that feels more like the fname server (vs. our app backend). Eventually explore decentralization and e2ee. We’re competing against Telegram not Signal. 5. GitHub repo merge ability is only for people on the Farcaster team. Hasn’t been something to solve for since we’re doing most of the protocol upgrades. 6. Worth pointing out a big recent improvement to decentralization: auth addresses. This has reduced a dependency on the Farcaster app for Sign in with Farcaster. There’s still work to do on making it easier to choose Farcaster on Coinbase Wallet (and others) for SIWF flows outside of mini apps. 2/2
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Samuel ツ
@samuellhuber.eth
4) DC's APIs yeah though besides adding automations / building these for DC's not much to build with since competing clients would need to poll these so unlikely they will (CBW don't today, Super, Uno Recaster doesn't - and I don't have other clients I use beyond these) cc @julieinweb3 what's Taco's DM setup, how do you think about tit?
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julie.base.eth ↑
@julieinweb3
thanks for looping me in! on Tako we don’t support direct 1:1 DMs yet. partly because of the polling/reactivity tradeoff you mentioned. building a smooth real-time UX on top of polling isn’t trivial, especially if decentralization is a design goal. we’re exploring two directions: - group-based anon chat first, kind of like public or semi-private “DC zones” inside communities. this fits better with our current product design + async social vibe. - longer-term, we’re interested in composable messaging that could plug into Farcaster infra but feel more like Telegram UX-wise.
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Samuel ツ
@samuellhuber.eth
Thank you!
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