Assumption: a credibly neutral decentralized social networking protocol is desirable.
In order to achieve "credibly neutral decentralization" for the protocol data it must be 1) replicated across many servers / nodes 2) user-controlled, i.e. the user does not have to rely on any other party to add / remove messages to the protocol 3) sign ups are permissionless.
This means that anyone (or AI) can sign up for an account and post whatever they want at the protocol level. Any compromise on this negates the goal of "credibly neutral decentralization" for the protocol data.
However, just because the protocol itself is credibly neutral and decentralized does not mean clients / apps have to be. In fact, opinionated filtering is desirable from a user experience point of view.
So the practical end state: protocol is as neutral as possible, clients / apps get to choose what to show from the protocol, building a client is permissionless.
This means raw protocol metrics are always going to have noise. This applies to any permissionless protocol, including the web, email, Ethereum, etc.
Ethereum (arguably) has less spam than the web or email because it charges a small fee to use the network. Farcaster does this as well, but just upfront and then limits how much storage you can use of the network at any point.
Aside: related to #5, we publish the (opinionated) Warpcast spam labels for the benefit of other developers. But no one is required to use them. @neynar and @openrank have built their own scoring model. Multiple spam models is a good thing for the protocol.

February 11, 2025

Why wallet?

Here's our rationale for shipping a wallet in Warpcast.

Better UX in an app you use every day

Make onchain actions reliable and smooth directly from the feed—frames and token links. No app switching or deeplink bugs.

Automatic onboarding

New users don’t need to download a separate app—it’s already there when you sign up. If you get a reward, a $degen tip or an airdrop in your first week, it just works.

“Singapore of crypto”

Today, Farcaster is much smaller than web2 social networks. However, if the % of active users with funded wallets is really high, we have a near term opportunity to be a “small-population-but-high-GDP country”.

Developers can permissionlessly launch a frame, have it appear on Farcaster clients that have integrated wallets. “Get to your first 10,000 transactions by launching on Farcaster”.

Yes, you can launch on other networks, but their algos hate links and the drop off from seeing something in a feed to website to wallet is going to be high.

November 22, 2024

Where are the apps?

Why aren't there more compelling consumer crypto apps?

Up until recently, blockspace was expensive and slow. In the last year, that's no longer the case. Also embedded wallets / smart contract wallets / Passkeys will continue to make it straightforward to make any crypto app aware. On-ramp APIs are also much better (but still the largest point of friction for a pure consumer app).

It's 2024 — the consumer web is 30 years old and the modern smartphone era is almost 20 years old. Internet software is a mature industry. Obvious ideas (regardless of whether they involve crypto) are solved.
So if it's an existing idea + crypto, you usually getting, at best, a 10% improvement. It's not a 10x improvement. And if it's not 10x, you won't really get people many people to switch. (And for the last 2 or so years, crypto's brand association has been more negative, so if anything it's made a product overall worse from growth standpoint.)

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