Farcaster

ok so now that pro is launched

time to revisit the “probably dumb but might work after you launch subscription ideas” notion doc

Biggest benefit of Pro will be the new design space for MM team

It vaguely reminds me of the old Google Fridays where every person got to invest time in working on interesting side projects that may or may not have immediate value to the product’s bottom line, but were worth exploring

Luxury features get some love

playing /bracket, assisting /bracky, talking /greatbooks

the incentives are a bit whack. unless the changes are in the protocol there is no incentive for other clients to honor the pro subscription

farcaster (the app) doesn't see any of the subscription revenue so they would just building features out of benevolence to farcaster (the protocol)

imo this can be fixed by clients earning a portion of user rewards based on where they cast from though

Yeah I think of this very much in line with the “main app is bootstrapping the protocol” strategy

I don’t think it’s very relevant or helpful to clients, but I think we’re too small for viable clients until main app creates the big growth moments

How are you thinking clients should fit in rn?

1) was never really a fan of this framing. it totally undermines third party efforts to grow the protocol and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy because no resources are allocated to finding out how we can work together to grow it

2) it will no longer be true once the coinbase wallet integration goes live. at that point they will probably bring on a lot of new users and have to offer the pro subscription in the app to access the protocol features

My take on (1) is more based on observation — I’m very much in the “there is no later unless there’s big growth” and Merkle has carried growth. The idea of mult clients is cool, but builder energy can’t go anywhere when there’s just not enough density of people. Ie, there’s a natural user incentive to aggregate our social activity into one common place while we are small. I trust (key word!) that Dan and V genuinely want a protocol so I don’t worry about the moves being made to facilitate practical growth before theoretical neutrality.

(2) feels like it can be easily figured out as the Pro product evolves and the client ecosystem evolves. For now, imo, clients are using FC primarily to piggy back a critical mass of open social graph, not bc of idealistic properties (or promises). So does it matter that much yet?

I know I must be missing some angles here bc I’m not actually building a client like you. 

I guess my ultimate question is: is this all problematic in reality or in theory?

on 1) we can't be sure there will be a later! we're all forced to wait on merkle to solve this problem with no clear answer while there is an abundance of willpower from engineering to product to marketing in the community rearing to help the protocol succeed

on 2) afaik the 4 embeds and 10k words are going to be protocol features so it should show up in CBW. i'm just being pedantic because the subscription is called Farcaster Pro but there is no incentive for clients (including the farcaster app) to build on top of it. there is a clear opportunity to incentivise them to though and it has the potential to be a decent revenue source for clients

On (1) I just don’t see any reason it can’t happen later. For example, when farcaster grows enough, bracket will then have enough sheer sports fans here that it makes sense to build a sports oriented client. (What do you think?)

For (2) I prob don’t fully understand how it’s working rn and intended to work in future. I wasn’t thinking of the 10k words and 4 images being on the protocol itself (ie, is it guaranteed to show up on CBW etc) but more as something I can do in FC app. What are the main problems you see this causing users/builders?

@farcaster dev / dad / books, cooks, ski, code ~ there are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

What I’m alluding to looks more like creating markets for bringing users and content to the protocol

Redistribution of storage fee revenue to clients that onboard high quality users is one avenue that I’ve thought of

I think the protocol rewards algo is actually a decent platform to build this on

reality is registrations and hubs are permissionless but the capital + schlep to build a consumer app is a massive hurdle

others apps growing the protocol wouldn't look like MM taking each feature it builds and protocolizing it (unrealistic and slow) or turning into. a headless service (decentralization theatre)

at least the biggest complaints I've heard about "no resources" wouldn't matter if a client was onboarding their own users