daos

The Farcaster ecosystem largely revolves around two main providers: Merkle Manufactory (MM) and Neynar. Both offer services that span the full stack, from low-level infrastructure (like Snapchain nodes) to end-user clients and miniapp tooling. I consider node improvements, specs, and documentation part of their offering in this context.

This creates a resource allocation dilemma. As a startup with limited time and engineers, you naturally focus where ROI is highest. Right now, that seems to be at the top of the stack: ROI = end user growth.

But this focus narrows innovation. While low-level infra allows many creative paths, the higher up you go, the fewer options you have. MM and Neynar appear to prioritize miniapps, wallets, and small UX features (like profile banners or max number of cast embeds). This is also reflected in the uneven documentation quality (ex., there is a dedicated website for miniapp development, 99% of the documentation is about using js/ts, the migration from hubble to snapchain is hardly reflected in the docs, and so on).

The result: it’s increasingly difficult to build anything truly new. If you’ve tried using the low-level stack, you’ve likely hit countless friction points: a small detail here, a small detail there, a change that has not reached the docs yet, FIPs that would have made your life much easier but are of low priority, design decisions optimized for quick user growth and not DX.

I know the answer: demand is king. 

I generally agree. But, maybe user growth is in places not on the path already laid out. And my concern is that diverging from this path, is getting harder and harder.

(3/3)
It's the same thing you can see on this Github markdown file that a16z put together (and I guess they have billions in funding?) - it was updated a month ago but contains a bunch of stuff that seems to be dead: https://github.com/a16z/awesome-farcaster

Even worse/sadder/more ironic than that is that this really cool tool I came across called FarMap that exists to "explore the Farcaster ecosystem" seems to be broken and stuck in an infinite loading loop: https://www.farmap.io/ Why doesn't Farcaster or the community have ownership of it to make it keep working? What went wrong with incentives? It didn't break yesterday - it was the same weeks ago.

Again, many of these things are excusable for hobbyist and purely community-lead projects but when massive protocols have massive VC funding and you notice things like this time and time again (I've seen it on many projects, not just Farcaster) it raises serious questions about the hot potato game and actual community ownership of a protocol.

I'm not intimately up to date but I think the focus I have seen so far is for people to build more and more apps - I kind of get the feeling that many of these may end up as abandonware. I made a very extensive set of posts about previous Farcaster ecosystem projects that just end up idle/broke/unmaintained before but it got little response: https://farcaster.xyz/tomatoxyz/0xea755a07

Building a great ecosystem should focus on people and groups primarily before fancy apps/technology. You need to have a sticky way to get users to join and stay - that should be at the root of all decisions. You want the best users to congregate and have a mechanism to build apps/ideas from the bottom-up instead of having people trying to build things top-down.
(2/2)