This chart shows the number of casts I’ve posted each month since I first joined, in July 2022.
What happened in August 2023? I started running my own hub, and in October, Farcaster opened signups to everyone (until then, it was invite-only).
That p2p version of the protocol, with all its flaws, is what really got me passionate about Farcaster. I ran my own hub, and it had the same privileges like any other hub. But if I discovered Farcaster today, would it feel as exciting as the 2023.09 version? I’m not so sure.
I was thinking about this while watching this presentation about the “ATProto ethos.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A-0k58TfPo
We used to have these kinds of discussions here, too. Not so much anymore. The Farcaster ethos has become "DAU growth", there is no passion about extensibility, data ownership, censorship resistance. I don't feel there is any vision about the protocol, how they want it to look in one, two, five years, just a list of feature requests, prioritized according to some DAU metric.
Yes, I know, "none of these matter if we don't have millions of DAU".
Like I said: "DAU growth".
I also know I'm a niche audience, you can't grow to millions of users like me. Oh, well.. 7 replies
8 recasts
50 reactions
0 reply
0 recast
6 reactions
2 replies
0 recast
1 reaction
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
1 reply
0 recast
5 reactions
0 reply
0 recast
2 reactions
0 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
0 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
