⋅ ⋅
First off, when it comes to onchain social media, the question should be: why?
We have plenty of social media apps already - Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.
So what would be the purpose of trying to create a new decentralized competitor, like Farcaster, and why would anyone actually want to switch or add it to the repetoire? The first reason that occurs to me isn't actually about deplatforming, censorship, and all of the legitimate concerns people have about centralized companies controlling social media today. I actually think the composability of developing on an open protocol or platform is the most powerful aspect as to why it can win over incumbents in the long run.
Open
Simply put, Joy’s Law is true, which is that most of the smart and talented people in the world don’t work at any given company (even the megacorps like Meta). If you give people the ability to build on a neutral platform with enshrined rules about how the protocol works, people can get super creative. They’ll dream up features, apps, and experiences that far surpass what any individual company can accomplish themselves, simply because a single company only has so much time, energy, and focus. In addition to this, many will choose to open source their contributions and this tends to have a compounding effect on development within a given ecosystem.
This analogy is done to death (for good reason), but HTTP and SMTP are perfect examples of what neutral infrastructure and protocol standards can allow to flourish. Even Twitter originally was an open protocol that allowed developers to use their API, and in doing so, the community developed tons of features that we now associate with the social media giant: retweets, @replies/mentions, hashtags, link shortening, and even embedded media. After Twitter and Facebook notoriously cut off API access, many entrepreneurs who had begun building businesses were burned by the closing of these platforms. And that’s precisely why having an open, transparent protocol is so important - because it allows developers to invest their time and energy without fear that the rules will change at the whims of a single management team. Chris Dixon's Read, Write, Own covers this dynamic at length, and was an invaluable account of internet history for me.
Low Barriers
Now, because these platforms and the associated data are open, it gives rise to unique characteristics such as the ability to actually own one’s social graph. Currently, most social media platforms have strong lock-in effects because your followers are unique to that individual platform, and if you want to leave, you have no way to properly migrate that following with you. There are numerous ways in which this can be an existential risk for someone whose business relies on their social media following, but putting that aside, I actually find the converse situation more interesting - if your followers are portable, then you and your following can hop from social media experience to experience, trying out any client app that integrates with the Farcaster protocol for instance.
This means, given there’s a critical mass of users on the Farcaster protocol, the switching costs for different apps trend to zero. I’d imagine there are quite a few social apps in the startup graveyard that had novel mechanics and potentially even better user experiences that, for various reasons, failed to gain that critical mass of users so they never took off. Even if this isn’t true, if someone chooses to stick with a single client for the protocol, the open and composable nature of the protocol means that all sorts of experimentation with ranking algorithms, user analytics, and commerce features can be built around any client.
Experimentation
We can already see this kind of experimentation in Farcaster with the introduction of ‘Frames’ which essentially is a primitive that allows for app-like experiences within the feed of the main client, Warpcaster. Within just a couple of months people have used that very basic functionality to create in-feed shopping experiences, polls, NFT minting, wordle, chess, and more. This type of enthusiasm to create is overflowing from a relatively small community - as of writing this May 16th, 2024 there are about ~50k daily active users. Imagine what’s possible if you sustain this level of creativity and energy at 1, 10, or 100 million daily active users. The culture of any social media app undoubtedly changes as it experiences growth, but the core proposition that stays the same is that when you empower people to build experiences around apps they love and use, you’ll never cease to be amazed.
It’s still super early days for onchain social media, and there are many more value propositions I didn’t cover, but needless to say I see a ton of potential and I’m watching Farcaster specifically very closely :)