How to think about Farcaster protocol data

It's like the web — anyone is free to create a website and host it.

There is no moderation at the WWW level. And even in the cases of DNS seizures (extremely rare; multi-jurisdictional), IP address will still work!

Post-permissionless, the raw protocol data from Hubs was never going to be "nice and clean". This is why PageRank was necessary for web search. A useful public API from Warpcast is the Power Badge: https://docs.farcaster.xyz/reference/warpcast/api#get-all-power-badge-users

Would encourage people interested in looking at Farcaster data to move to social graph-based models. Start with a core of 100 “good” users (you get to pick!), see who they follow and engage with, rinse and repeat, etc.

Long-term, the only way to measure relevance and influence of a given Farcaster account is who is following and engaging with an account, not the raw numbers. This isn’t possible on web2 social since the platforms don’t expose the entire graph via APIs. On Farcaster, the graph is public and permissionless.

Why don’t we increase cost? We started at $12 per storage unit per year in October and had a lot of good users complain it was too expensive. So we iteratively brought it down over the last few months to $3 (paid to the protocol). Warpcast charges $5 because of mobile app store fees.

Increasing cost to sign up makes it less likely that good users sign up, but doesn’t deter all spam (just some of it).

All that said, of the 326K FIDs with a paid storage unit, i.e. valid protocol users, ~300K are paid sign ups. So every DAU by definition generates at least $3 in revenue to the protocol. You can see those payments onchain: https://optimistic.etherscan.io/txsInternal?a=0x00000000fcce7f938e7ae6d3c335bd6a1a7c593d

This doesn’t happen in web2 social (since sign ups are free). Although, that’s changing: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1779930065469383166

Finally, just because an FID has a lot of followers and raw engagement numbers on the protocol, doesn’t mean the average user on clients is seeing it. Warpcast and other clients are going to continue to refine quality filtering (in the same way search engine indexes and email spam filters evolved).