Crypto Sapiens - Farcaster | Building a Sufficiently Decentralized Social Network with Dan Romero Co-founder of Farcaster
Primer: The peril of using centralized platforms is that you could be arbitrarily deplatformed. Dan Romero is building Farcaster, an alternative to these centralized platforms. In this episode of Crypto Sapiens, he shares his thoughts on decentralized social networks and identity and how they relate to the platform he is building.
Background
Started working in tech in 2013
Read the Bitcoin white paper and got excited about cryptocurrencies
Joined Coinbase in 2014. Was there for 5 years
Left Coinbase in 2019 and reconnected with Varun Srinivasan, his ex-colleague at Coinbase
Wanted to make RSS competitive with Twitter. Project was initially named RSS+
RSS+ eventually turned into Farcaster
Thoughts On Decentralized Social Networks
Centralized platforms like Twitter and YouTube can arbitrarily kick you off their platforms
In the early days, Twitter has an open API ecosystem
Recently, Twitter shut down the entire third party ecosystem
Zynga built on top of Facebook. When Facebook changed their strategy, it negatively affected Zynga
Farcaster is optimizing for:
The relationship between the creator and their audience
Apps and services to be built on top of it
2 implementations of decentralized social networks:
Those that use blockchains
Those that don’t use blockchains
Those that don’t use a blockchain are larger in terms of monthly active users
For Farcaster, identity mapping is on-chain. This prevents any one organization from owning it
The rest of the things that are done with Farcaster happen off-chain. Their view is that gas cost would increase over time if things are placed on-chain
“Our view is that it doesn't actually solve anything by putting more stuff on-chain. Yes, you might get a little bit of composability if, for example, a follow or like is an NFT, then you could in theory sell it. But our bet is that most of those things don't actually matter.”
- Dan Romero
Every piece of content on Farcaster is tied back to that on-chain identity:
Users get the usability, speed, and user experience of Web2
Users get the strong ownership guarantees of Web3
The Challenges Of Identity Systems
In the history of identity systems on the internet, it started with servers and websites and moved on to platforms where people login with their email as their identifiers
The next iteration involved using phone numbers as identifiers/logins for mobile apps
From their standpoint, the concept of identity should be a simple human readable name
On Farcaster, they have a fixed identifier called the Farcaster ID
Users are allowed to change their username, but their Farcaster ID remains the same
“By separating the Farcaster ID, which is permanent, and the username, you can retain your followers and all of the kind of stuff that you've done, while being able to swap in potentially a new username.”
- Dan Romero
Building Farcaster
Is a big fan of permissionless innovation
People think that the ideas and experimentations that happen on the internet is not valuable
Innovation has slowed. Large tech companies have turned the internet into silos (e.g. Airbnb, Coinbase, etc.)
There’s nothing special about large tech companies like Coinbase. Even though their competitors charge lower fees, people still flock towards their brand
Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma posits that companies start with low-end disruption before working their way up the value chain
Clayton made a prediction that Android will disrupt the iPhone in this manner, but it has not materialized
Romano suggests that consumers are not the same as businesses:
Businesses act more rationally
With consumers, there’s emotions, branding, etc.
Need to have irrational individuals like his co-founder and himself to start working on a Twitter competitor when Twitter is already at scale
Currently working on a Farcaster hub — Can think of what an Ethereum node is like for the Ethereum network
Devs will have access to Farcaster data and APIs through Farcaster hubs
Will Farcaster Hubs Result In Future Forks In The Network?
Farcaster has a consensus algorithm like a blockchain, but they don’t have to solve for double spend. It is just a post
Users can simultaneously consume content from both chains if that were to happen
Users use Farcaster to optimize for distribution. Hence, the incentive is to get as many people as possible to access your content
Opening Up Farcaster To Devs
When they launched the Farcaster beta 1.5 years ago, it required a lot of technical work
For the first 9 months, no one built anything. There was no documentation
As they onboarded more people, people started building on top of Farcaster
Had a huge increase in the amount of dev activity over the last 6 months
They are putting effort into getting Farcaster Hubs out
Once Hubs are out, they will shift their focus towards documentation and giving people ideas/open source libraries
Anything Else That He Wants To Share
People often bring up content moderation to him
His answer is to focus on the particular client:
If it’s gmail, it would be gmail’s spam filters
Gmail’s spam filters would differ from another email provider (e.g. Microsoft)
Browsers do not do any content moderation
Search engines make no guarantee that they will index your page. They can de-index you without any arbitration
In the case of their client, Farcaster is a US-based company, so they have regulations that they need to follow
If someone wants to use a client that respects the rules of a particular country, they are free to do that
Farcaster, as a protocol, will probably spend more time focused on anti-spam or anything that is trying to harm the performance of the network
In contrast, the clients will focus more on the content
What Inspired Him In His Crypto Career
Fell in love with blogs on the internet
“You could be online and start publishing. And if people found your stuff interesting, you could grow an audience right? There's no gatekeeper effectively.”
- Dan Romero
Paul Graham’s essays were influential
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