Farcaster, a crypto-based decentralised social networking protocol hit the news this week, by raising an eye watering 150 million USD, with a valuation of 1 billion USD, all the while sporting around 80K daily active users. For context, Bluesky has around 300k daily active users. The news raises a few questions: What exactly is Farcaster, […]

I take a deep dive into crypto-based social network Farcaster, aka Torment-Nexus-on-the-blockchain.

I think that crypto/web3 is mostly really dumb and bad, but I also do think that what happens on other decentralised social networks is relevant to understand the fediverse. The different protocols influence each other and I dont think they should be understood in isolation. That is why I wanted to have a better understanding of what Farcaster is, and why a16z wanted to spend so much money on it.

  • knightly@pawb.social
    31·
    28 days ago

    We already have that, it’s called a Distributed Hash Table, no blockchain required.

    • AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      28 days ago

      But there’s no global consensus, it’s not trustless, and smart contracts unlock a lot of additional composable capabilities.

      • knightly@pawb.social
        31·
        28 days ago

        Trust, consensus, and access control are session-layer issues that don’t need to be solved by a transport-layer protocol. Social networks deserve to be able to forget things.

        • AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          28 days ago

          Which is a whole lot of extra engineering that is already taken care of with a blockchain. Whether social networks should forget your username/registration is a different debate.

          • knightly@pawb.social
            1·
            26 days ago

            It really isn’t a different debate when you’re talking about putting them on the blockchain, and all that other engineering has already been done by other distributed social networks.

            • AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              25 days ago

              Ok, we are talking in circles, you have your opinions, I have mine. If you want to talk about this over voice at any point, let me know, I don’t think text is going to get anywhere, and Lemmy has a pretty strong bias against crypto (which I understand, but obviously disagree with)