“Conflating Farcaster 'the protocol' with Farcaster 'the social media platform built on top of the protocol' limits people's perspective on what can be built on Farcaster.”

I think this mistake even exists at the protocol level. User data, links, verifications are the core social primitives that can be integrated into almost every app

Casts and reactions almost feel too opinionated to sit alongside those primitives and they dominate the cost of participating in the network as a validator

Again, I think a sufficiently funded and motivated person would be fine with existing stuff. The limiting issue is finding someone with both. 

I don’t think most people realize how brutal spending multiple years growing a consumer app is. Let alone 5 years.

It’s tricky because the tech doesn’t matter without users but once the tech has users it’s hard to change

Everybody wanna come up with a non-Twitter use case, nobody wanna grind for 2+ years to get retained users in a polished mobile app.

The issue isn’t the tech, it’s a person that can 1) get funding 2) grind for users for years

Startup artist seeking inspiration.  Champion of /bcard

i'm not suggesting they shouldn't exist at the protocol level. i fully agree the content is what we're all here for and the distribution that the protocol provides is the core of the network

it's essentially a nit on the architecture being inefficient and raising the costs of building on the protocol i.e. onboarding users is expensive and running infrastructure is also expensive

i just think casts and reactions should essentially have their own separate storage with different guarantees than those primitives that are shared across all use cases

It’s more than just the primitives, it’s the way they are integrated and delivered.

You can have user data, links, and verifications at the HTTP level and not even use FC.  So why do people use FC?  Because there is an opinionation that has been wrapped together in a usable package.

All this to say there is no value to the network (and being a validator for said network) without these opinionations.

blockspace babe. cultural attaché from ‘06 twitter. adjacent possible fanatic 🌐 UTC–4

mosdef. but without having that data onchain the volume of signal on which to build wouldn’t be sufficient, no

Imagine how much cheaper it could have been to onboard users if storage didn’t include casts/reactions

dan is accurate in that the tangible app experience is necessary for the protocol to proliferate (pop3 w/out email client goes to zero)

that said, the long game is mosdef experiences that run on fc rails but aren’t built around casts and reactions