New Behaviors

Farcaster is enabling new behaviors (Frames, Channels) and this tends to be self reinforcing. I’ve seen Frames used in the classic speculation and casino-like behavior but also some really cool new ones (like Paragraph’s ability to post longform, polls, “stories” etc.)

The creative energy and excitement are palpable and that tends to be self reinforcing. I’ve seen a lot of quality engagement in my posts, and the dynamics in Channels is really unique.

I’m more excited to open the Warpcast app than Twitter and this is a great leading indicator.

New Frontier

Some users are creating a new audience, bigger and more engaged than Twitter. Still feels possible to become “big” here and that attracts good content and people trying to make it.

It’s like the Americas vs. Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, or the West vs the East in the US. A new frontier attracts misfits and ambitious people.

TikTok had the same dynamics v. Instagram, where influencers who were not that big on Instagram were able to go to TikTok and became huge.

Stewardship

Overall I’m very impressed by the stewardship of Dan and Varun. They’ve been level-headed in most interactions I’ve seen.

There will be bigger challenges now if this keeps growing, because there will be tough decisions to be made while the protocol is not decentralized.

We’ve seen already one case where a decision to take a channel from a user who was squatting on it (/bankless) was met with outcry from a part of the community that felt that it was his right to buy and squat on this channel, and that Bankless should’ve bought it from him.

This was minor, but more decisions like that will need to be made and that will put additional pressure on the founders. It will be interesting to see that develop, because this is the major value prop of Farcaster: power will ultimately be ceded from the founders to the network itself, gradually.

Conclusion

This was not a typical week for me (took a few days off), so unlikely that I’ll spend that much time going forward.

That being said, I’m building a company that starts on top of a corporate network (WhatsApp) for distribution but aims to create a blockchain network that will ultimately cede power to the users themselves — not in the social media space, but in banking.

So a lot of the lessons here are relevant, from using a corporate network for distribution (Dan on Twitter, us on WhatsApp) and how to deal with progressive power handover.

Excited to see how it all develops.