There is a lot of innovation occurring related to how people create, maintain and interact with their social network online. Now and then, I try one of the newer social networks to follow what’s happening.
For the past few months, I have been using Farcaster. Farcaster is a social network protocol built on Ethereum that developers build social applications with. The applications I’ve used are mostly Warpcast and Jam, which use Farcaster to create a Twitter-like experience.
The team building Farcaster is also building Warpcast. Besides Warpcast, there is a small ecosystem of third-party applications built with Farcaster - video-focused, image-focused, newsfeed-like, and those that enable communication within a closed organization, to name a few existing applications.
The key idea is to build a social network by splitting the necessary components in two. One part is the core data: user handles, messages, and data of who follows who. This makes up the network. The other part is various applications, which make the network accessible to users. The application governs what user-generated content to surface and the general user experience.
Historically, the social network and its application have been bundled into a single product. Social media incumbents don’t allow access to their networks except through their proprietary applications. There are some exceptions, but those exist only as permissioned by the owner of the network. It’s not possible to permissionlessly build a competitor to the social media giants that uses their network. A lot of user value comes from the access to the network. It is therefore important for the networks to own the window to it since they run ads.
Dividing the network and the application makes a big difference. It makes business sense for a company to build on a solid foundation, where it doesn’t rely on a business that it might compete with someday. Ultimately, it gives users the choice to use their social networks as they wish and more applications they can use it through. The user can have multiple networks, none of which are inherently tied to a single application.
A reasonable way to ensure that application developers have a permanent and permissionless foundation to build on is by using a decentralized blockchain. That is a great way to store data without a single actor having control over it, thus decentralizing it. The downside is that it worsens the immediate user experience, because blockchains are slow and expensive. Thus there is a tradeoff between the immediate user experience and decentralization.
Farcaster’s take on this tradeoff is to make the network “sufficiently decentralized”. This means that slow and expensive blockchain data is kept to a minimum. The on-chain components are limited to those necessary to enable permissionless development. Some blockchain-based social networks that I’ve tried are more blockchain-heavy. They sacrifice user experience for that, which is highly noticeable, and not something mainstream users would use, at least not in their current form. The Farcaster team is building a protocol that enables products just as good as those used today, but that also allows for an ecosystem of other applications.
The next frontier of Web3 is to build products not only for ideologists and technologists, but for the pragmatists. An application doesn’t get mainstream traction if the user experience isn’t up to snuff. Ethereum is like a typical legal proceeding: slow and expensive. In fact, Ethereum is possibly the world’s slowest and most expensive computer. But it unlocks new possibilities. The real challenge isn’t building something new on it, but products people want to use.