1. The single most important thing for Farcaster is to grow total daily active users. If the protocol has 10M daily active users, there’s a lot more opportunity for all developers. This is Merkle’s top priority — grow the number of people using the protocol.

2. Given Farcaster’s current scale, building a VC-scale Warpcast alternative, i.e. Twitter-style functionality, is unlikely to get a lot of user traction in the near term. However, if you’re thinking in a multi-year timeline, the best time to start is now. But will be a slog!

3. The most difficult part of building a consumer app is getting and retaining daily active users. Even more pressing for VC-backed apps (time preference is much higher). Farcaster likely needs to be 2 orders of magnitude larger before that user population is large enough for apps to be 100% focused on FC.

4. So should I build on Farcaster today? Yes. A few potential strategies:

   1. Sign in with Farcaster / graph-only approach — don’t worry about signers and cloning all the Warpcast functionality. Focus on using the permissionless Farcaster graph and identity to enhance onboarding and making your app more retentive. Study Drakula

   2. Build narrow and deep — there are a growing number of channels where a dedicated, channel-specific client may serve a growing number of power users. Study the work-in-progress Nouns clients

   3. Leverage distribution — Warpcast doesn’t penalize links (we love links!), so consider building frames or other features that allow your users to share to their Farcaster audiences. Study Paragraph

   4. Build orthogonally — integrate multiple networks, only use a subset of casts, e.g. an image or video only client, or don’t even show casts at all and focus on functionality. Study Yup or FarHouse

   5. Play a different game! — create an open source project, leverage the growing ecosystem of economic primitives like hypersub to help support it. Charge an up front fee for your app. Focus in on power users and generating sustainable revenue. Study Herocast or Supercast

Stuff to build on Farcaster

1. Waitlist frame — make it easy to sign up for a product launch; send a direct cast then the product is launching or allowing batches of users off the waitlist

2. Airdrop to everyone in a thread action — for a given cast, extract the connected addresses on Ethereum or Solana for all replies engaged with by host, or simply everyone who liked the cast

3. Send a direct cast to everyone who liked a cast action

4. Follow everyone who replied to a cast and engaged with by the cast author, e.g. in an AMA

5. Follow Friday action — @alice starts a follow Friday cast and then anyone she is following can submit 3 people to follow; 1 click follow all of the recommended people (spammers won’t be followed by @alice so no need to worry about that)

6. Tinder PWA or simple mobile app for finding new users to follow

7. Top 25 most liked casts from people you follow in a daily digest newsletter, send via direct cast

8. Any time a cast >50 likes from people you follow, send as a direct cast

9. NFT pre-release frame + direct cast — similar to the waitlist idea, have a way to get notified about a new NFT drop before public launch

10. Summary of new people with power badge every Tuesday morning sent via direct cast

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

2. 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!

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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).

6. 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

7. 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).