ted on Farcaster

Daniel Fernandes pfp

Daniel Fernandes

Thanks to Claude again for organizing my braindump into an article. If you hate the new wallet emphasis, this blog's for you. If you love the new wallet emphasis, you can show me who's boss by buying $dfern. Either way: clank clank. Farcaster's Growing Pains: The Delicate Balance Between Crypto Innovation and Mass Appeal

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Dan Romero pfp

> Lead with social connection, not financial speculation in its public messaging We tried this for 4.5 years. We saturated the market for people interested in this and aren’t specifically focused on political affiliation. My push to you: the network is permissionless. If the opportunity for all social no crypto is so obvious, why isn’t someone building that client? Additionally, I think it’s easy to say you should go after X or Y group of people. Much harder to actually spend the time trying to convince them only to have them tell you why they aren’t interested (or onboard and then just churn).

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Daniel Fernandes pfp

Daniel Fernandes

I blame Claude for that bulletpoint, jk jk. In all seriousness, I agree, y'all did actually do the thing, and I probably should have mentioned that, because I remember it well: cozy corners, find your tribe, URL to IRL etc. (I feel the messaging kinda worked b/c I have a hunch Rose at Bluesky started borrowing "cozy corners" from @ted, but I can't prove it.)

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ted (not lasso) pfp

ted (not lasso)

fwiw, couldn't agree more with dan. sad, but true. 1. i spent most of last year experimenting with URL to IRL and social connection; it doesn't scale OR you need an entire product team focused on it (think 222, rodeo, timeleft, partiful or luma, etc.) and even then it is still a HUGE risk with slow growth. 2. farcaster is mostly crypto users and has crypto primitives (wallet, coins), but the average person doesn't want to hang out on a crypto social network so >half the existing content and exciting features don't make sense to them. this impacts user acquisition and drives churn. 3. rewarding content with $$ is simply not sufficient to attract new users and have them retain at scale; this was immediately obvious after onboarding the journalists or college students and experimenting with the creator rewards. increasing rewards, improving video UX, etc. was never going to change that. 4. my creator/user onboarding was hand-to-hand combat and the common denominator across the most successful onboarded users was the effort or attention dan, linda or i gave to the relationship; again, not scaleable. leaning into the wallet and tokens is the single greatest decision farcaster has made (outside of its permissionless primitives) to support growth and i fully endorse it, even if it isn't the vision i initially signed up for. in fact, i wish the decision to let go of creators / content / connection and instead lean into crypto happened sooner.

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Elias VM pfp

This is interesting as we clearly have TBA aiming at content/creators and FC as a client leaning towards usability. The way you express these ideas makes it seem to be mutually exclusive, therefore TBA and FC-client appear being opposed somehow.

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Tobystic.eth pfp

How do you multiply leaders ? How do you multiply the Dans, Lindas and Teds?

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Jacob pfp

appreciate this candid and clear-eyed diagnosis!

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Matthew Fox 🌐 pfp

Matthew Fox 🌐

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Garrett pfp

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Daniel Fernandes pfp

Daniel Fernandes

Thanks for the detailed retrospective! I think we're starting to tease out the diff between "What's good for Merkle's success?" & "What's abstractly good for FC as a social network?" Same problem with Ethereum & the EF. Not trying to be cynical, but it's okay to acknowledge the delta between stated vs revealed preferences here. Everyone wants the utopian Twitter killer w/ 0 UX friction powered by rainbows and unicorn farts...too few are willing to pay enough for it, too few are willing to give up their Twitter fame for 'moar cypherpunk'. Substack is learning this too. OTOH, one of Bluesky's mottos that I like is "the company is a future adversary," and 4.5 years in: I think everyone on here needs to do a little more introspection on how Merkle, the protocol, & the community are going to align long term more than just vibes and reputation. This includes: what can the community do to give Merkle/Neynar more skin-in-the-game. Not a unique problem; nobody has figured this out yet! At least we have a lot of web3 magic in the toolbox that has yet to be tested & that is more than just trustmebro alignment. Again, I'm not saying "let's be cynical", I'm saying "let's honestly calculate everyone's long term trade-off matrix, including altruism/reputation/goodwill/cashflows as factors."

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antaur pfp

Yes - and - a big opportunity is to get the class of 2026 excited about apps which earn them money and app coins which they can degen into. New retail still has not arrived onchain - most went into ETFs. Imo Fc is orders of magnitude more compatible with the interests and needs of the incoming cohort. I run blockchain for beginners courses and I take them here. I could t and wouldn’t recommend them CT bc most OGs and long time trenchers feel jaded and/or cringe

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tldr (tim reilly) pfp

tldr (tim reilly)

fascinating to read this, thanks. this is what my intuition was from the outside, but very clarifying to see it described definitively from the person on the ground.

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nick pfp

Probably the most transparent and clear answer I’ve seen to this question. Thank you.

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ck aka ckdesignedit pfp

ck aka ckdesignedit

I think it can be smart to pivot towards a target that might bring more people on and help growth, but I feel like what some are getting upset with are the non target goal people are being told to go elsewhere when they want to be here. And when those people being told to go elsewhere share their opinions on that take some crypto dudes are going off on them on top of it. Probably feels like the floor falling out of a place they've become to love. I think there's no need for one group to be ostracized in order to onboard another. This is coming from someone who personally has not felt any more welcome here by the platform itself than I did 2 years ago bc beauty has never been what anyone cares about in crypto (even when I have on chain products and projects).

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Patrick | Megapot pfp

Patrick | Megapot

This is really helpful context “Sad but true” is often how builders should listen to the market / users

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Adam pfp

@adamhurwitz.eth

I tested out Lens|Hey or whatever it's called currently before Farcaster years ago. I wonder how they're doing? Are they also reprioritizing due to similar challenges with new social platforms?

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Pichi pfp

@procoin curate union

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michael Hunwick 😇 pfp

michael Hunwick 😇

@michaelhunwick

I think the transition happened at the perfect moment, If they went all in on crypto from the get go, from the outside looking in it would’ve looked like another Bitclout or Friend[dot]tech (RIP)

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noice pfp

https://app.noice.so/?castHash=0x08dc9f2976e7bce45d29e348b88efd823baf3799&timestamp=1761543579596

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Gauntlet pfp

Plus, between smart wallets, stables, onchain yield (shameless miniapp.gauntlet.xyz plug), and nascent cool new stuff like agents, there's a ton of almost-consumer-grade experiences that I'd say are ready onchain. Eventually one of these new ideas, experiments, apps could break out and eat web2 social share. Prediction markets are a great example.

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derekhoiem.eth pfp

Interesting. Well, I’m gonna bring the creators to the table. More space for me to play in.

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Joann.base.eth pfp

The dream started with connection, but the reality compounds through crypto. Sometimes evolution means letting go of what you loved at the beginning.

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