9mo ago

What is Farcaster, and why did it raise 150M USD?

fediversereport.com What is Farcaster, and why did it raise 150M USD?

Farcaster, a crypto-based decentralised social networking protocol hit the news this week, by raising an eye watering 150 million USD, with a valuation of 1 billion USD, all the while sporting around 80K daily active users. For context, Bluesky has around 300k daily active users. The news raises a f...

I take a deep dive into crypto-based social network Farcaster, aka Torment-Nexus-on-the-blockchain.

I think that crypto/web3 is mostly really dumb and bad, but I also do think that what happens on other decentralised social networks is relevant to understand the fediverse. The different protocols influence each other and I dont think they should be understood in isolation. That is why I wanted to have a better understanding of what Farcaster is, and why a16z wanted to spend so much money on it.

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Your article is a pretty reasonable and fair evaluation of farcaster, but then your post saying crypto/web3 is "mostly really dumb and bad" is not very nuanced. I know a lot of people on Lemmy don't like crypto, and that's what's in the meta right now, but if you are going to give something a fair shake, give it a fair shake, don't just anticipate backlash for covering a crypto topic and preface it with "it's mostly really dumb and bad". Ya there are a lot of scams, and a lot of bullshit projects, but there is a core of really useful infrastructure there, which farcaster is using for self sovereign account registration/ownership.
- Seems inefficient, couldn't the same thing be accomplished using local DBs rather than the world's most inefficient ledger?
  
  Farcaster uses decentralized hubs and multiple clients, if you want global usernames you need a global db
  
  What if we don't want global usernames? What if we're entirely satisfied with global user IDs in a DHT?
  
  Those are different design choices that have different trade offs, I didn't make these decisions, I'm just explaining how it is
  
  No worries, I'm merely confident that the tradeoffs necessary to employ a blockchain aren't worth the supposed benefits thereof.
  
  I understand, don't get me wrong, 99% of stuff in crypto is hot garbage, but having a global database that isn't controlled by any one (or even dozen) entities is pretty powerful. The 2 guys that started farcaster could quit, or get hit by a bus, or decide it's not profitable enough and pivot, but at least you have control over your profile still. If reddit was decentralized more, they wouldn't be able to shut down their APIs for 3rd party clients.
  Trust me I understand the criticism of block chains, but if we want open source and the internet to thrive and not be controlled by companies, we need a global layer that is neutral.
  
  We already have that, it's called a Distributed Hash Table, no blockchain required.
  
  But there's no global consensus, it's not trustless, and smart contracts unlock a lot of additional composable capabilities.
  
  Trust, consensus, and access control are session-layer issues that don't need to be solved by a transport-layer protocol. Social networks deserve to be able to forget things.
  
  Which is a whole lot of extra engineering that is already taken care of with a blockchain. Whether social networks should forget your username/registration is a different debate.

14 comments