How Farcaster Changed the Trajectory of My Life
Originally published on Paragraph.
My New Online Home
For the past year, Farcaster has become my new online home.
I use it every day, and I can say the product feels magical, and the engagement is qualitatively better.
With a new social network comes new opportunities.
What Is Farcaster?
For those unfamiliar, Farcaster is a decentralized social protocol like SMTP to email.
Every user gets an Ethereum wallet for onchain actions when they sign up, and anyone can build clients on top of it that offer different frontends.
Warpcast is currently the most used client.
Why Farcaster?
X used to have many clients, like Tweetdeck and Twitterific, until it cut off its API access and killed them.
Now, X is just X whether you like its ads, subscriptions, shadowbans, and algorithm or not.
The beauty of Farcaster is client diversity and giving power back to users.
The Onchain Mullet
Since Farcaster is decentralized, users own their accounts and are free to move between clients.
For developers, they can build with all the open and permissionless APIs without fear of being rugged.
Many say Farcaster is like a mullet – web2 in the front, onchain in the back.
Growth
A month ago, Farcaster didn’t feel too different from a Reddit-X hybrid.
But since Varun and Dan launched Frames, Farcaster has become a social network, app store, and commerce platform all in one.
It unlocked a new distribution channel and kicked off hockeystick growth.
What Are Frames?
Frames are interactive apps embedded in casts/tweets that enable experiences while you scroll your feed.
Some initial use cases include games, shopping, polls, newsletters, NFT mints, block explorers, etc.
Frames are just a canvas for builders to paint whatever they dream up.
Why Frames?
Frames allow products to gain distribution as they meet the users where they already are.
Li Jin recently wrote, “consumer products now resemble entertainment, with users regularly wanting to try out the latest thing and then quickly moving on.”
Frames are an example of this.
Community
What I love about Farcaster is its positive-sum community.
Farcaster has given me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to contribute where I can, collaborate with builders, and learn from my role models like Jesse.
It’s the perfect place for anyone, anywhere to come onchain.
Takeaways
My takeaways from Farcaster:
- Build mobile-first
- Make onboarding easy
- Open platforms are powerful
- Composability creates magic
- Abstract away the blockchain
- Enable what’s not possible via web2
- Minimize clicks to do things onchain
- Manifest Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own
Get Involved
I can try to describe Farcaster all day, but the best way to understand it is to use it.
Channels are a great starting point, I even host a few:
- warpcast.com/~/channel/consumercrypto
- warpcast.com/~/channel/consumer-apps
- warpcast.com/~/channel/consumer
- warpcast.com/~/channel/infra
Helpful resources:
- x.com/base/status/1758262775942684800
- github.com/a16z/awesome-farcaster
Let’s build!!
