Beyond Farcaster
Every new platform generation begins by quietly cloning the last one. This is so reliable it's almost a law of thermodynamics. The RSS blog post became the tweet. The tweet became the cast. All of them ordered by time. When we started building Uno, we also cloned the Farcaster feed — the same timeline, the same reply threads, the same like-and-recast mechanics with different plumbing underneath.
This felt natural. We needed familiar surfaces to onboard users. We needed to meet people where their mental models already are. But it was also an entrepreneurial trap. When you clone a product, you inherit the old paradigm's assumptions about what "social" even means. You accept that the "social object" is the post. That the primary interaction is the feed. That the measure of user success is engagement on a timeline. You end up building better plumbing for yesterday's house. You're building a castle in someone else's kingdom of collective product thought.
The moment we stopped asking "how do we make a better feed?" and started asking "what do people actually want to do with their social graph and their wallet?" — we started having fun building again.
Merkle
Before going further, it's worth being clear about what Farcaster got right, because it got a lot right.
Portable identity. Your FID, the atomic unit of social status as a service, belongs to you. Verifiable social graphs. Permissionless clients. Anyone can build on the network. Anyone can build experiences on top of the protocol. The app layer and the protocol layer are separated in a way that creates real surface area for experimentation.
Three years ago, this felt directionally correct. Farcaster proved a solution to the portability problem that everyone started to fear (re: the Elon takeover, the TikTok ban).
But Farcaster-the-protocol got irrevocably conflated with Farcaster-the-app. And the app, for all its product virtues over the years, has still remained primarily a feed. It's Twitter with better infrastructure and primitives, but also a far smaller population of users and fewer content surfaces to mine from or make a living off of.
And it didn't help growth that the community's collective imagination stayed anchored to "decentralized social" rather than the more interesting question: what becomes possible when identity and social proof are primitives anyone can compose with?
Dead Protocols
Users see tokens as casino chips. Someone launches one — the smart contract executes, the bonding curve works, the liquidity bootstraps exactly as designed — but it is still mostly gambling without the odds. It carries no community. No context. No reason to care beyond speculation. The mechanics are complete but the meaning is absent. Sure, some projects have tried to improve this with limited data hydration within their wallet experience, but it is still grounded in the social object being trading.
The same pattern holds across other areas of crypto. An NFT collection drops. The art is interesting. The contract is audited. But who is this person? What's their history? Why should ownership mean anything? The asset floats in a social vacuum.
Social context exists. Somewhere. Reputations, histories, audiences built over years of public activity — but it has nowhere to flow. The protocol layer and the social layer remain disconnected.
Today's agentic version of this problem is starker. We're at a place now where AI agents deploy contracts, generate content, manage treasuries, execute trades. An agent with those capabilities but no social grounding is seen as either a toy or a threat. Without social context, there's no trust. Without trust, there's no adoption beyond the novelty.
Agents need to inherit real, developed social context to be useful. They need to act on behalf of legible identities, with verifiable reputations, connected to social graphs beyond a follow graph that give their actions meaning. The question is what kind of environment makes that possible.
Generative Social
The defining feature of the last decade of social platforms was the feed: content created by humans, ranked by algorithms, consumed passively. The next decade should look much different — dynamic, collaborative environments where humans and agents create together, anchored to real social relationships and portable identity. Ownership debates between the rights of the agent and the human.
What does this look like in practice?
Workspaces where you and your agents (and other people's agents, like
@bracky) collaborate on artifacts that didn't exist before. Images. Videos. Miniapps. But also simulations and 3D models. AR/VR environments. MicroVMs spun up to run experiments. Visualizations that query your network's activity and render something no one else could see.
Compositions that span modalities and contributors. An agent generates an interface. Another populates it with data from your social graph. A third refines the output based on feedback from collaborators whose reputations are legible onchain. These artifacts form a running system, forkable and remixable, carrying provenance from everyone who touched it. Imperfectly decentralized and distributed.
The creative primitive, or the social object that we bond over, becomes the execution environment. Social proof authorizes what agents can do, what resources they can access, what collaborations they can enter on your behalf. Ownership becomes “which part of the social contract they fulfill” (h/t
@cojo.eth).
Think of the social graph and the wallet as the load-bearing walls. The protocol primitives are durable. The app surfaces we expect today are temporary, like furniture moved around the room.
Us
This is the trajectory Uno is on, even if we didn't fully plan for it at the start.
We began by building a Farcaster client. That's the familiar surface — the feed, the casts, the channels. Then we built recommendation systems that understood content at a deeper level than chronological order or simple engagement metrics. We embedded casts into vector spaces. We built ranking models that could surface relevance rather than just recency.
And then we started asking: why is the output of all this intelligence still a feed?
What if the client isn't a timeline at all? What if it's a surface where agents and generative experiences connect to a social graph that gives them legitimacy? What if the user's identity, relationships, and wallet become inputs to new kinds of interactions — not just passive consumption of posts, but active, generated, contextual experiences?
The shift is from "app that displays text" to "supporting protocols where social context flows into agentic media and generative experiences and getting really, really good at discovery and surfacing those creations."
This is why we will spend less time now on the social infrastructure we started with as a leading product. Not because it doesn't matter, but because it's becoming a substrate rather than "the thing" to put in the hands of real users.
The interesting work now has moved up the stack, to the question of what you build when social proof is another primitive you can pass around and others can play with.
Beyond Farcaster
I titled this "Beyond Farcaster" but it is not us abandoning this space. Erica reminded me earlier to be really clear about that point. It's us graduating from our time spent learning about the core primitives proven by the Merkle team and their efforts.
Farcaster solved the identity and portability problem that made Web 2.0 social a series of walled gardens. That solution is durable. We'll be building on those core principles and the social graph it enables for a long time.
But what's not durable is the assumption that an end product for anyone here is yet another Web 2.0-flavored feed client.
The builders who understand this will stop iterating on feeds. They'll start asking what becomes possible when a wallet or a smart contract is another free, permissionless input you can pass to an agent, embed into layers, weave into a generative experience. They'll treat the timeline as one size-and-shape of canvas, and not the fundamental architecture.
That's the frontier beyond Farcaster. That's where we all should be building towards.
https://paragraph.com/@christopher/beyond-farcaster?referrer=0x47D25240311C444e4534a968c9F0F82d262AE0b4
