this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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What is Farcaster, and why did it raise 150M USD? (fediversereport.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] AtHeartEngineer 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Farcaster uses decentralized hubs and multiple clients, if you want global usernames you need a global db

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What if we don't want global usernames? What if we're entirely satisfied with global user IDs in a DHT?

[–] AtHeartEngineer 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Those are different design choices that have different trade offs, I didn't make these decisions, I'm just explaining how it is

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No worries, I'm merely confident that the tradeoffs necessary to employ a blockchain aren't worth the supposed benefits thereof.

[–] AtHeartEngineer 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

We already have that, it's called a Distributed Hash Table, no blockchain required.

[–] AtHeartEngineer 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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 1 points 5 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)