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What

Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social network. It is an open protocol that can support many clients, just like email.

Users will always have the freedom to move their social identity between applications, and developers will always have the freedom to build applications with new features on the network.

Founders: Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan

Current Experience

Farcaster is taking a product first then protocol approach - the protocol follows the product

App Experience

Currently Farcaster has a single client side application in beta (farcaster app) - its main purpose is to give developers a better idea on use cases to build on top of the protocol.

The current app experience is called Farcaster and it is a social media app that resembles a web3 twitter. They are building a carefully curated community of crypto builders and a developer platform to promote the concept of signal over noise.

• This app currently only has a mobile and desktop client - there is no web client
• Given that the app is in beta, users can only get on invite only at the moment - users get invited by DMing @dwr and providing their ENS
• Users that are active on this app use it mainly to engage in intellectual discussion.

<aside> 👤 As a user I want a high signal platform with a mature tight knit community where I can engage in intellectual discussion.

</aside>

Some comments from users on the farcaster app experience:

https://twitter.com/htormey/status/1562896469304041473?s=20&t=wzWaY616kZaS_0LYnKlRGg

https://twitter.com/TylerMorrey/status/1564372187296845825?s=20&t=wzWaY616kZaS_0LYnKlRGg

https://twitter.com/ljxie/status/1564384446404599808?s=20&t=MyK4mXCoir5xrmmxnTZIfg

• currently they prefer the farcaster experience over twitter due to the niche and high signal community present.

Protocol

Given that they have an open protocol, users are building apps on top of it. Anyone can build a client application to broadcast messages on the Farcaster network. A user’s profile is linked to their ENS/Ethereum Wallet, and each user gets a unique farcaster address for user’s data to live on different servers.

• Farcaster’s Protcol is still in its very early stages - the product has been the main focus
• Website with all apps built on top of Farcaster utilizing the current farcaster app: https://farapps.vercel.app/
  • Some popular examples:
    • perl - app that allows users to collect top links/articles on farcaster?
    • eventcaster - internal event page for the farcaster community to see what events other farcasters are going to

What’s on their Roadmap?

• Aiming to push at a web client by Q1 2023
  • Users have expressed that they like the mobile experience better than the desktop experience. In effort to push out feature faster on the mobile client - the farcaster team is looking to retire their desktop client.
• Working on shipping v2 of the protocol where developers can build read/write clients