What is Farcaster?

hi my name is adrienne i am a former software developer spent my entire career in enterprise saas and and in the b to b space i have been on farcaster for over 2 years and have really found it to be a phenomenal place to meet people and grow a business and and nannish prav and i are now hosting a livestream new show on farcaster called gm farcaster

the state of farcaster report just came out in i guess what we're in september 2024 it is a ridiculously comprehensive data analysis on who is on farcaster the types of people their habits their spending habits what they're interested in the it was based on survey data and as well as analysis of connected wallets

yeah so i think what we found are there are or i'd say what what makes the audience unique is because farcaster is a crypto native platform you might expect everyone to be full on crypto enthusiasts and while there's a lot of that what really makes them unique are these kind of three attributes so early adopters these are people who tend to try out new technology or new products or new things because they're interested in kind of being on the leading edge of of progress i'd say

everybody is a kind of identifies also as a builder not necessarily developer not everyone's a founder but it has this kind of positive sum mentality of people are writers bloggers developers founders vcs so kind of a broad different different roles but people kinda tend to identify as building and and creating new things and and related it's the the the vibe is very optimistic so optimistic about the future optimistic about the potential for new technology to improve lives

i think what be because of that what you find is people tend to be more willing to try new products and be more gracious with giving feedback so farcaster we found because of this audience it's like a really good place to launch new products new ideas because you have people who are just like they wanna be the first ones to try new things

yeah and we'll see if that lasts as farcaster continues to scale from 50,000 daily active users to a 100000 to a 1000000 to a 1000000 you know over time but farcaster has been described as a twitter alternative and what one of the biggest differences is the the vibe and and and the vibe and the culture of farcaster being different than far than than something like a twitter we have been criticized on farcaster as being too nice as someone who spends all their time on farcaster i don't think that is true i think there's a difference between niceness and kindness and compassion but it it really is a i i think it's not so much nice as it is safe it is safe to experiment it is safe to make mistakes and it's safe and and and because of that i i think it's just the the most special place on the internet but especially if you're kind of wanting to launch products and reach this kind of optimistic builder early adopter crowd

yeah so when we say social graph what that means is it is the people you follow and the people who are following you so just like any social network there's a few characteristics you know whether you're on a twitter linkedin instagram tiktok there's certain things that are just always the same everybody has a profile your username your bio your photo and then you can find people to to follow and find people you can all of that data is fully owned by you the user and the and the way that as opposed to the corporate corporation so because farfetch'd is decentralized and on a blockchain you have ownership of that which also means you can take that with you if you choose to leave so this is the imagine if you decided you didn't wanna be on twitter anymore you could go to another network but still retain all of your followers and your following and and your identity and that's that that's kind of the big difference with forecaster as opposed to any of these other networks because it's decentralized because it's built on a blockchain there's there's ownership and and these other attributes about being transparent composable open comes because of its technology being a blockchain network

yeah and if you have heard about farcaster you might have heard or just even other decentralized alternatives

they can be a little confusing at first so i don't wanna i think as a user it doesn't really matter and it shouldn't matter what what what the difference is but we'll kinda talk so a protocol is a it's it is the decentralized

back end if you will of social network it is not owned by any one single entity the client is really the user interface or how you interact with that protocol and can be built and i think the best way to do this is just with a an analogy so imagine if if you're familiar with a twitter if you're using twitter you log on to or you go to x.com or you open your x app and you're interacting with your data you're sending posts you're replying that whole experience is a client is at the client level so imagine that now imagine though if you could access all of the data that is in the twitter database without asking permission through an api or directly through the back end

and and even in the early in the early early days of twitter there were apis and they were open and what you saw is there were all these other apps that got built outside of twitter there was tweetdeck and and a bunch of others that were really popular and then eventually as the network got got bigger twitter pulled access to these apis and you could no longer build on top so and that is because that it it it wasn't actually built on a protocol the the the client so forecaster as a protocol is all of the data in forecaster is open it's assessable it will always be there will be apis that you can access you have access to that data and no one can ever take that away so the protocol for forecaster is just all that back end information so if you're a developer you can build on top and being guaranteed that you always have access and then the clients are just the applications websites iphone apps android apps anything else that you're using to as a user to access the information on farcaster and how you access it

and in the gmail analogy if you have a gmail and i have a yahoo we can still communicate because we're communicating on the protocol layer even though we're accessing it through different apps and that'll be the same in forecaster which is there's multiple clients i can use one client called warpcast you can use another one called supercast but we can still communicate and even though we're not

mean the biggest one we experience is about user experience it is getting better every year every day and the experience of i i think web 3 in general is getting better farcaster today has an experience that is on par with web 2 networks you can sign up with an email address you can sign up using passkeys you don't necessarily in the old days when when we first signed up you needed a wallet you needed a seed phrase you needed to know a lot about crypto under the hood of how it works and you don't really today that being said the user experience still lags a little bit behind farcaster was founded in 2020 it only went permissionless meaning open to anyone who wanted to go in late 2023 so it just hasn't had the amount the same amount of time as the other social networks to harden and and improve user experience at times so from a from a ux it's a little it's a little behind some of the web 2 platforms though catching up quickly

related to that being new you don't have the same critical mass we talked earlier about how far cast our user it's a smaller user base in our opinion we think it's a better user base and it's where we're choosing to spend all our time and we think it's really important to pay attention to because the people on forecast are tend to be quite influential and and active but it's smaller you're not going to reach the same critical mass as you are on a tiktok instagram twitter platform the flip side of that though which is also a pro which you talk about it's a lot easier to grow on farcaster because it's smaller and then and like anywhere in the crypto world i think this is the disincentives which is there is i'd say more of an opportunity maybe for some of the

let's say bad actors in in crypto to try i mean we haven't seen much of it in farcaster to be honest but in terms of people using tokenization and and and maybe crypto features too what do we wanna to i don't know it's not really on farcaster but it's the it it could be there i'd say it's a little whack a mole yeah i mean this goes to moderation as well as yeah the the warpcast and warpcast is the the the primary client on farcaster so we'll use those names interchangeably the team is very very active about spam moderation and and and says like scammer so it really hasn't been an issue but you know kind of over time because it's a less mature platform you may see some of that

yeah and i that this is just everything every pro here has a almost an an opposite con to it and that's the this is the the trade offs with blockchain network so with a blockchain network you get permissionless innovation anyone you know you have like we said in the last slide you don't have to worry like the the data is open it's protocol data anyone can build on it anyone can build on top it's permissionless you don't need to ask permission to any sort of corporate entity because of that you get this explosion of creativity and net new behavior and and it's super invigorating and fascinating to see on the other side you may get an explosion of negative behavior as well and and apps you might not wanna see so i'm a big believer in over time it's going to like the the blockchain network is where you wanna be building because you can't get censorship resistance you can't own your data you can monetize the same way on the web 2 platforms and the the pendulum has swung too far in favor of corporate networks in web 2 and we need the pendulum to swing back and you know along the way there may be some cons but they're all in my opinion worth getting past and and as we kind of grow forecaster they're just they become much less of an issue i think but

yeah i mean just just the the the first one on ownership and control which is any any existing social network that you are on is owned and controlled by a single company so whether that's x or meta or tiktok or bytedance

which means they are in control and we as users aren't we're subject to their policies and their control and and they're changing and their algorithms as as they change because farcaster is a protocol the protocol is owned and controlled by a decentralized network it just means that there's no any there's no single one entity in control

i think there's

related to that and then this is kinda the last one listed is like this user autonomy because you are reliant on a corporate network in the web 2 world we have no control as users we're entirely dependent on the corporate policies in the farcaster world because it is built on a blockchain network we have full ownership and control of our account so if workcast does not like what i am casting they can't take my account away they can't change my profile they can't change my name and they can't take my ability to communicate with other users away and that's a guarantee that's like guaranteed by code not by policy i think the other big to to me the best like benefit is under interoperability so in any of the web 2 platforms they may have apis but you're limited to what you can build based on what the policies on those apis are you don't have access to all of the data you may have access to only what they wanna give you because farcaster is a protocol there's infinite opportunity to because you have access to all that data is build and interoperate and we call these lego pieces so when you come into farcaster and in later modules as we start walking you through how you use the feed and what is this what you start to realize is you have a singular experience on something like warpcast which is a client but a lot of the a lot of the experience you have are actually lego pieces from other companies so there's concepts of frames and cast actions and channels and mini apps but you have a very rich experience that is built from lots of companies and lots of corporates and and and lots of different app developers building this interoperable kind of future

yeah and imagine mhmm go ahead just like it just imagine for your company or your brand what you could do if you had programmable access so you don't necessarily need to build a forecaster client but imagine creating a page off of your website that lets you invite or as you're in if you have events inviting everyone who follows you on farcaster in a programmable way giving discounts to people letting people unlock so there's all sorts of applications that aren't necessarily social media applications but are social versions of what they're do of their app you can kind of integrate with farcaster easily

i just think the beauty one of the beauties of forecaster when we talk about interoperability is if you're on other socials other socials have been penalizing links lately mhmm and maybe this has been quite i i know a lot of people have talked about this but platforms don't want your user want their users to leave so if you're on x and linkedin and you're putting a link in your post that gets penalized by the algorithm because you're sending people away from you know let's say x somewhere else farcaster loves links and it's and and and work as in particularly so this is like an example of mhmm between bounty caster between events this is not farcaster data but they're it makes a very very rich experience to send you outside of the platform like they're not trying to keep you in the platform and and if you do and and they're kind of creating just richer experiences within the platform from outside sources as well so we'll dig into it in the future but i think that's one of the biggest differences between web 3 and web 2 socials