Farcaster

rish on Warpcast

reminder if building on FC protocol - client -> protocol has a time gap - an action on WC shows up on WC immediately but during times of heavy load, can take up to mins to appear on the protocol (this is expected and WC is usually pretty good) worth keeping in mind when building frames that rely on quick actions

The goal is of this article is to explain the technical details of what I'm seeing while building on the protocol, in case it helps you build. 🙂

Varun and Dan have written in length about the protocol, read architecture doc here. In quick summary, every app / client on Farcaster reads and writes messages from an underlying network of hubs (nodes). Each hub stores a state of the network and communicates (aka gossips) any incoming messages to other hubs its peered with. Through this gossiping between the hubs, all hubs eventually receive the same messages and can serve it back to the clients.

However, this does mean that there will be times where individual hubs have a different state of the network because they have not yet finished gossiping all the messages to other hubs. This can happen either at the hub level if some hub is running slow or at the client level where the client can have bottlenecks and not push data to their hub fast enough. In the latter case, the client has data that users of that client can see without problems, but that data is not available to the rest of the network. This creates disjointed experiences between clients that are built on the same underlying protocol.

The thing to note here is that if you're coming to Farcaster after having built on blockchains, this can be a bit surprising. Blockchains have a deterministic current state which is the head of the chain and apps know whether they are reading the latest block in the chain or not. Farcaster is not a blockchain, and thus, the concept of time within Farcaster is vague. Hubs don't know whether they have the latest message. The idea being that for social data having the latest message is less important compared to financial data. In the case of financial data, if you don't have the latest record, you don't know how much money was moved and who owns what. Dan and Varun made a bet that social data does not need that level of finality. That bet allows Farcaster to move data at much cheaper prices than a blockchain would be able to. Writing all Farcaster data to blockchains would be extremely cost prohibitive, something that stopped prior decentralized social networks from growing.

I personally think this is a good bet, at least for the time being. If blockchains ever get cheap enough, maybe Farcaster can introduce protocol upgrades that respect finality more. However, till then, current version of the protocol allows sufficient decentralization with eventually consistent state. What does this mean for you as a developer for Farcaster? It means accounting for states where hubs and clients have different data, especially during times of peak network load that Farcaster has been experiencing lately.

See these casts to get a sense:

Farcaster

Varun Srinivasan on Warpcast

Hubs are seeing record traffic and message propagation is sometimes delayed. Should have significantly improved performance in 24 hrs https://warpcast.com/woj.eth/0x82d3e781

Farcaster

Linda Xie on Warpcast

Warpcast currently delayed ~1 hour showing "@bountybot" posts, it's up on our website bountycaster.xyz and picked up by Farcaster network if you want to check if it worked correctly. Thanks for the patience 🙏

This level of sudden growth is insane and Merkle has been handling it extremely well. Neynar gets a fraction of that load and we have been fully under water for the last ten days, scrambling to get our server traffic under control.

I expect such issues to reduce as the network scales and grows more resilient, though we are far from that yet. I am optimistic that this is just the beginning of the growth curve. There will be growing pains as with everything and the best products will figure out how to provide a robust user experience in spite of such gaps. There will be innovations not only at the consumer product level but also at the developer product level e.g. better debugging tools - take a cast hash or fid as input and see the state of the cast or the user across multiple known hubs and public replicators. I have been pushing developers to try a version of this by checking the network state on clients that run on different hubs e.g. Supercast vs Warpcast.

Farcaster

rish on Warpcast

PSA if you're seeing data slowness -- test with @supercast. Write from there and see when it appears in our APIs. Warpcast is having issues pushing data to the protocol due to increased load (quite understandable, their team is working hard on a solution). This might help you isolate where the issue is in the stack.

I am not sure what all the solutions look like here but I am curious to see what people come up with.

At Neynar, our main focus has been on scaling the Hubs and replicator infrastructure to better support the growing traffic. Manan and I will write more about our solution stack in detail in a different post. If you have been building using Neynar, you know we've been seeing issues. I appreciate you bearing with us.

If you read this far and have ideas (or corrections I should make to this article), reach out @rish on Farcaster. If you chose to build on Farcaster, we're glad to have you! 🪐

Permissionless signups are around the corner and it feels like the Farcaster community is just getting started! 🔥 We wanted to share a list of ideas that we think would be cool to build on top of Farcaster.

Clients

Farcaster being a turing complete protocol means that Warpcast is just one of the ways to interact with the underlying data and the people in your network. Here's a few ideas we'd love to see in the ecosystem:

1. Slack UI on top of channels, responses to a parent cast show up in Slack-like thread views (https://farcord.com/, https://farchat.xyz/ 👀)

2. Instagram story / TikTok like client for seamless video creation and consumption - memes channel is a good example of how funny the community can be with still images, we might be able to unlock more with other media types

3. Fitness client that integrates Whoop, Strava, Nike+, Apple Health data and combines that with the conversations and the network in the Fitness channel

4. Permissionless channel browsing client for content under parent_urls that don't show up on Warpcast; can also create channels on the fly and write to such new channels

Analytics

5. Quantified analytics for your profile - essentially farcaster.network but for any given fid (www.farcasteruserstats.com/)

6. Reputation scoring based on engagement / activity / follower <> following relationships on the protocol - will only get more important after permissionless signups

7. Protocol usage for Farcaster users i.e. which protocols / dapps does the Farcaster population use the most, what are interesting finds on the tail end? (dune.com/yesyes/farcaster-users-onchain-activities)

Developer

8. Explorer that takes in a hub url and provides a stream of data from that hub, useful for troubleshooting when developing (casthose.xyz 👀)

9. Plug and play bot platform - no code tools to build a bot on Farcaster

Marketing solutions

10. Marketing tools for Farcaster e.g. social pilot for Twitter (saymore.tv 👀)

Fun

List is incomplete without experiences that are not utilitarian but just fun to play around with

11. FC profile trivia - answer questions about Farcaster users and earn bragging points e.g. "why doesn't dwr eat fruits?"

12. Extension that inserts FC content on Twitter so that when viewing Twitter feed or profile, tweets and casts show up interspersed on the same timeline

13. Mutual follows - when looking at a profile, see who amongst your following graph follows them (docs.neynar.com/reference/relevant-followers)

14. Unfollowed by - who's the target of unfollows 🌶 (hatecast.xyz)

Have other ideas or already built any of the above? Ping @rish and we will update this list!

🪐