Varun Srinivasan on Farcaster

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https://warpcast.com/~/channel/fc-updates

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Varun Srinivasan

FIP: Direct Casts A proposal to make Warpcast's Direct Casts an open standard that any Farcaster client can use. https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol/discussions/226

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KMac pfp

This is a bad idea to take on right now. Would shelf this entire idea in favor of other priorities. Full stop. But wait there’s more. Who is ‘Farcaster’ that is operating the server? gc & smh all at the same time. Protocols are rules not organizations. Conflating these leads one to think like a business instead of a headless public good. More gatekeeping‽ really Keep it as wc direct and group casts. Open that if you want but keep it out of Farcaster protocol if it’s not on a node, permissionless & independently verifiable. An idea- Work on creating more flexible app specific context-containers that are ai ready.

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Andrei O. pfp

Gatekeeping is maximal because if you didn't check there's a whitelist like we are used to, so it's much worse than a centralized server, as per usual devs will need to request permission from the team not even in an automated way. I mean I am just astonished by the lack of foresight, imagine if you want to get permission to read/send DMs on Twitter, Threads, etc is easier. You can literally make an app in 5 minutes that has those permissions, how blind you must be to understand that writing such poor proposals is a complete disaster from an optics perspective.

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KMac pfp

Devs gonna dev 🤷🏻‍♂️

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KMac pfp

More seriously, this is likely the direct result of corporate control of a public good. This ‘working code’ ‘general consensus’ BDFL thing is now probably the last thing I’m concerned about in Farcasterland. The rest they’ve delivered on promises. Keep the dc/gc ‘protocol as MerkleM’s if you want but stop bloating Farcaster.

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Andrei O. pfp

Correct, that is how it looks from the outside, building in the open was always only after, many people complained. There's no interest in building in the open, if you do a `find whitelist` command over all proprietary code that the Farcaster team drives I am sure you'll get like 50+ hits... Not trying to be cynical but for me, it seems like the main interest is to appear to be open while trying to retain as much control as possible without suffering too much backlash, that's why there is so much promotion of "openness", if you're open you don't need to promote that, because is just a fact.

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artlu 🎩 pfp

isn't this needed for the Coinbase Wallet client to hook into?

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KMac pfp

It’s a good question & had crossed my mind when I saw Jesse had liked my reply.

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Andrei O. pfp

As I said the justification was flimsy, to say the least, in the dev call it was stated that the whitelist purpose is to limit potential malicious apps, on the GitHub discussion when I pointed out that if you sign with the custody address anything you can lose the account directly not just grant access to DC's( which is also possible at this moment, no one stops you generating a WC token and access DCs with that trough Warpcast API if you sign with custody account) then the justification changed to, we don't want to deliver devs an unstable API that's why is closed off. Literally self-contradiction and self-owning, it's clear the real motive of whitelisting was other to begin with, which erodes trust because I don't see any scenario when scrambeling to offer a strong justification is good optics.

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Varun Srinivasan

we're going to make direct casts available to all developers in the ecosystem. this is an improvement over the status quo. i understand you don't agree with the specifics of how we're opening it up, but we're going to reach the same end state of open access to direct casts by the end of this year, or hopefully much sooner.

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Andrei O. pfp

Great to hear, is not about agreeing is about, trying to comprehend some reasonings, and also trying to steer away from some decisions that seem damaging to this ecosystem. Like with frames, now v2 exists but when v1 was implemented, I said it doesn't make sense to be implemented with images and that and that using iframes is the proper way. Some things that have been promised have been implemented others were omitted but a lot of potential was wasted. I joined 916 days ago which is a long time, and I saw many reversed decisions that took Farcaster to a better path but also wasted potential and momentum because the community had to fight to get decisions reversed. Honestly, how many times the Merkle team has hastily reached for a whitelist, whitelists are the last thing you shoud reach for. It's not about opening, it's about increasing trust by being open in the first place. But you are correct that I shouldn't fret, like you said I already made my opinion clear enough that's the most I can do.

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