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The year is 2049. Farcaster has become the internetās dominant conversational protocol. It āand the entire landscape of social mediaā looks nothing like it did in the old days.
Here's how it all happened. Make yourself comfortable; wall of text incoming.
Years ago, Reddit introduced the UpCoin to reward karma, resulting in bot farms owning 99.9% of circulating tokens and users fleeing in droves. Posting a meme now costs about as much as renting an apartment in New York City. Meta booted all users from Instagram after realizing it was more efficient to let its nuclear-powered AI data centers generate and react to slop photos without humans in the loop. And X collapsed last year after X Ć A-Xii Musk, its 29-year-old CEO, decided that all posts had to be uploaded directly from Neuralink devicesāleading to 99.9% of human users being banned within hours for, well, unfiltered thoughts. Only XRP maxis remain, having no thoughts of their own.
Farcaster, on the other hand, achieved escape velocity and exceeded its foundersā lofty goal of growing from 37 to one billion users. OpenAI ānow the first robot-owned, sentient megacorporation since Sam Altman and Peter Thiel merged their minds onto a silicon substrateā uses Farcaster data to train its GPT-ā model, providing Merkle with a steady and lucrative revenue stream.
In hindsight, Farcasterās success was inevitable, though it didnāt always seem that way.
There was much hand-wringing in the early years over Farcasterās elusive PMF and qDAU. One misguided experiment circa 2025 was to turn the app into a social wallet. Co-founder @dwr even boldly proclaimed that āsocial + trading is our DNAā. Instead, it turned out to be more like an extra chromosome of the 21st pair. Shitcoin gamblers, it turns out, do not make for interesting āor stickyā conversations. Nor is it sensible to make oneās financial activities socially transparent.
Shortly after, back when the U.S. dollar still held some monetary value, Merkle launched a USDC promotion offering 10% rewards on deposits up to $5,000. Farcasterās TVL jumped by $9 million (about 1,800 users going all in) before angry Merkle investors lobbied @v to stop squandering their money. Ten weeks later, both TVL and DAUs had returned to baseline ā proving that temporary yield does not, in fact, drive retention (let alone qDAU).
There were even whispers of an acquisition by Coinbase, which would have crystallized Farcasterās social-walletness once and for all. Thankfully, our valiant BDFLs Dan and Varun, in their impeccable ethics, declined easy riches in favor of a more noble long-term goal. In hindsight, they dodged a bullet: Coinbase, as we all know, has since rebranded as CompliFi, a fully KYC-ed L1 centralized blockchain that requires proof of paperwork for every transaction and takes eleven days to settle.
So what led to Farcasterās resounding success? Internet scholars point to a handful of factors.
The first was Merkleās decision to extend the Farcaster protocolās FOSS philosophy to its client as well, upon realizing that a portable social graph is only useful if thereās somewhere else to port it to. The non-cosmetic components of the Farcaster app were open-sourced, triggering a Cambrian explosion of alt-clients, each catering to its own community: gamblers and geeks, nerds and nihilists, pundits and poets, and yes, even furries. The original Farcaster app became more akin to the Linux kernel, upon which enthusiasts built their equivalent of specialized distros. Merkle, in turn, kept curating the kernelās core primitives through FIPs, for the benefit of all humankind.
The second factor was opening up the feed algorithm. Instead of a proprietary, one-size-fits-none solution, an executive call was made to modularize feed building. Users could now choose what they wanted to see by picking from an open marketplace of custom algos tuned to their favorite casters, political inclinations, and preferred themes. Reverse-chronological order and reply-bump visibility rapidly became popular options.
The third key factor was making channels first-class citizens, down to the protocol level. Rough were the early days; rumor has it that generative AI was discreetly called upon to prime the proverbial pump of empty channels with conversational liquidity. Whatever was used, worked. The UpCoin debacle led to a mass exodus of users from Reddit to Farcaster, where they found a familiar setup reminiscent of subreddits. The channel-first approach also dovetailed nicely with the new client diversity, with some specialized apps catering exclusively to one topic.
But beyond those technical decisions, what also mattered was how Farcasterās early tensions were constructively resolved.
Borrowing @cdixon.ethās metaphor, one such tension lay between computer and casino user archetypes. The former came to Farcaster because they believed in building Web3 technology to empower people through anonymity, credible neutrality, decentralization, permissionlessness, and zero trust. The casino folks were more interested in games of engagement extraction and profit maximization. Instead of taking a moral stance for one over the other (the short-lived social wallet experiment of 2025 notwithstanding), our beloved BDFLs wisely allowed alt-clients to cater to bothāwith varying degrees of degeneracy.
Another notable tension was between OG users (i.e., anyone with an FID no greater than mine), who feared losing the town-hall feel of Farcasterās early days to an eternal September of uncultured swine; and new users, who complained that the monolithic algo wasnāt giving them a fair chance at growing followers. That tension was amicably resolved by letting everyone choose what and who they wanted to see on their feeds. Instead of fighting a reactionary losing battle in defense of Farcasterās singular cozy corner, the solution turned out to be a positive-sum replication of that coziness across every niche community that organically spawned along channel lines.
And this, my dear friends, is the story of how Dan and Varun left an oversized imprint on this planet. Not by playing the VC and foundersā short-term games, but by going beyond where Jack Dorsey left off ā by channeling the spirits of Aaron Swartz and Satoshi Nakamoto, and by embracing the ethos of Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds. It is no surprise, then, that they both featured on this yearās Time magazineās Person of the Year cover ā again. 4 replies
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