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 few questions: What exactly is Farcaster, […]

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.

  • AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    7 months ago

    But there’s no global consensus, it’s not trustless, and smart contracts unlock a lot of additional composable capabilities.

    • knightly the Sneptaur
      31·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        7 months ago

        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.

        • knightly the Sneptaur
          1·
          7 months ago

          It really isn’t a different debate when you’re talking about putting them on the blockchain, and all that other engineering has already been done by other distributed social networks.

          • AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 months ago

            Ok, we are talking in circles, you have your opinions, I have mine. If you want to talk about this over voice at any point, let me know, I don’t think text is going to get anywhere, and Lemmy has a pretty strong bias against crypto (which I understand, but obviously disagree with)