Stephan pfp
Stephan
@stephancill
What are the best technical resources for building algorithmic social feeds? Feels like a great opportunity for farcaster to open source their findings and tech alongside the client to help level up the other clients in the ecosystem (including those that don’t exist yet) cc @v
4 replies
1 recast
23 reactions
Varun Srinivasan pfp
Varun Srinivasan
@v
If open sourcing makes it easy for others to implement, X open source code should make it easy for anyone to implement a world class recommendation algorithm for a text based social network. This obviously hasn’t happened, so maybe the question worth asking is why?
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Stephan pfp
Stephan
@stephancill
they don't have an incentive to help others build good feed engines
1 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
Varun Srinivasan pfp
Varun Srinivasan
@v
What specifically is wrong with their open source code, that you can’t build good feed engines with?
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Stephan pfp
Stephan
@stephancill
i'm not sure what X's feed engine has to do with my ask? it should be obvious that seeing the official farcaster client's approach to building feeds would be 10x more relevant than X's
1 reply
0 recast
2 reactions
Varun Srinivasan pfp
Varun Srinivasan
@v
The most popular text based social network in the world has open sourced their algorithm that works exceptionally well. If you believe that open source algos are the answer, just copy theirs. It’s objectively better than ours in many ways. Have you tried this? If not, why not?
2 replies
0 recast
0 reaction
Stephan pfp
Stephan
@stephancill
1. their stack is almost 2 decades old 2. it's built on a closed data source 3. the repo was dumped with a single page technical blog post, no other guides, and isn't being maintained in the open 4. i'm not building a client right now, just want to learn – that blogpost is probably a good starting point anyway you built a pretty good algorithm from scratch on an open protocol, which is not something that is abundant in the online social landscape today – sorry for hoping that the feed algorithm would form part of this effort to open source the official protocol client
1 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
Varun Srinivasan pfp
Varun Srinivasan
@v
1. their stack is fine. the problem is its not a stack you know today and you dont want to learn it. the same will be true of ours, we have like 30 different components (athena, custom job processing queue, etc etc) that you have to learn. 2. our data will be private too. a major part of feed algorithms is view data, or what you've seen before. we can't open source that for privacy reasons, and without that, the system wont really work. 3. ok, so now you don't just want to see the code. you want someone to make it so that you can one click run it. that's a very different ask, and maybe impossible unless you are willing to pay as much as we do for our backend system, which is a lot. 4. and even if we do all this... you're not going to use it? but you're mad that we're not doing it?
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Stephan pfp
Stephan
@stephancill
i don't get mad about things i have no control over. was trying to help you by telling you what i would like to see as someone that wants decentralized social to win
1 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
Varun Srinivasan pfp
Varun Srinivasan
@v
asking for stuff that you're going to use is great feedback. asking for stuff that you're not going to use is just usually distracting.
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction