Two key problems for Farcaster

1. differentiating from other social media products (web2 and web3)

2. growing the community while preserving quality of signups 

Differentiating from other social media products 

Context on social media moats

One of the real moats of large scale social media products is the “media” i.e. content you can only find on that product / platform / protocol. The size of the network and the availability of media feed off of each other. You can’t find Twitter content on FB (even though both allow text broadcasts with variety of attachment types), TikTok content on Instagram, etc. 

The media / content advantage is gained by a mix of first mover tactics coupled with great, and ideally unique, user experiences that enable good media creation. The content creation and consumption experiences get commoditized over time and thus, it becomes important for newcomers to:

• move first to provide new creation experiences (e.g. Snapchat stories) that builds an inventory of new media on the platform

• maintain an edge by continuously evolving new media creation trends (e.g. adding AR filters to Snapchat visual content)

Users flock to new media experiences that enable new interactions and even fight against network effects (e.g. Instagram creators starting TikTok profiles from scratch to move to TikTok like video format) for such media creation and consumption.

Farcaster’s moat can potentially be web3 native media creation and consumption at the protocol level that attracts new users as web3 mindshare grows in mainstream audiences. Unclear what the full extent of this will look like over the next few years (we are still in the skeuomorphic era of web3). However, Farcaster is already on this path and the NFT Feed today is one such feature on the primary client. 

Problem 

As Farcaster scales, new users (especially non crypto native ones) won’t join and/or retain on the protocol/platform simply because Farcaster is decentralized. They will join if Farcaster provides an experience that is not available on traditional social media*. 

Potential solutions

Web2 social media has optimized the in-app funnel for most web interactions (e.g. signup on a form, read an article, etc.). If Farcaster can build the web3 versions of funnels (ideally less skeuomorphic and more web3 native), then it can enable new experiences that are not possible in web2 social media products. Long term examples of this are hard to imagine immediately, some near-term examples include: 

• minting NFT from the cast if mint page link is shared

• donating to Gitcoin grant directly from grant link shared in cast

• submitting a bid on partybid

• adding money to a PoolTogether pool, etc.

To support experiences like the above, Farcaster needs:

1. “Dapplets” in casts — rich web3 link attachments that allow quick interactions with the dapp right within the cast (similar to how Spotify might allow playing the track right from the link attachment)

2. A standard that dapps can adopt to broadcast such information when dapp url is crawled, such that the cast can then embed a “dapplet”

3. Farcaster client that supports importing a full mnemonic (instead of just connecting a read-only address), allowing web3 txns seamlessly via imported address 

Creating and gaining adoption of a new standard (#2) is a hard problem in itself. However, given increasing developer traction on Farcaster already, Farcaster standards might get strong adoption. Even without #3, read-only dapplets will be an improvement from where we are today. 

*PS - Some might say that new users will join because community on Farcaster is >> community on Twitter. That is very true today and a big reason why we are all here. However, I think quality will change as network size increases and that network size and node quality are always somewhat at odds with each other. Separate note on that below. 

Community growth

*Terminology (might not map fully to Farcaster protocol spec):
Nodes: User, cast, onchain activity, etc.
Edges: actions — like, follow, recast, watch, report, etc. *

Generally average node quality will drop as network increases number of nodes. Measuring this “quality” is a hard problem in itself. Facebook uses (or at least used to) a metric called meaningful social interaction (MSI) that measures the quality of a node in the graph (let’s say Node1) similar to Google’s Pagerank i.e. how many nodes share an edge with Node1 and what is the quality of nodes that share an edge with Node1 (measured recursively). This works — somewhat. When there are billions of nodes and manifold more edges, bad nodes reinforce themselves as much as good nodes do leading to, what we call, “filter bubbles”. Unclear if there is any real solution to this. Even physical networks of people create filter bubbles by choice (see coastal regions vs central US). If Farcaster nodes reach the size of FB, it’s unlikely that node quality will stay the same as today. Only way to preserve that is to create filters. Nodes will create their own filters and Farcaster clients will support such creation.