support Farcaster

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A "sufficiently decentralized social network." Don't know much about it yet otherwise. Looks pretty heavy on crypto people, like Nostr (#446).

• https://docs.farcaster.xyz/
• https://github.com/a16z/awesome-farcaster
• https://paragraph.xyz/@kc/atproto-vs-farcaster
• https://twitter.com/varunsrin/status/1629161481588580354

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Tried to create an account, eventually gave up. The official client is invite only, this other client requires a crypto wallet, and this other other client evidently can't create accounts.

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Data point to help determine priority: https://farcaster.network/ says right now there are 11k users, 3.2k MAUs.

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Evidently https://petar.substack.com/ / https://staging.bsky.app/profile/petar.bsky.social is offering invitations to WarpCast.

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https://warpcast.com/acidbrn (@acidbrn?) generously sent me an invitation. Thank you Aaron!

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This has grown a lot in the last year! Looks like ~20x from https://farcaster.network/ , now 300k total users, 50-60k MAU.

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Huh. https://farcaster.network/ seems to have regressed, it's now showing data from back in Sept. 😕

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https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster seems current. 260k total users, 25k DAU. No MAU number.

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Up to 400k total, 60k DAU, estimated 150k MAU based on the ~.4 DAU:MAU ratio near the bottom of https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster .

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I've been looking at the Farcaster protocol a bit more. It's similar to Nostr, in that users own their identities and keys, and can use different clients, apps, and relays ("hubs") interchangeably.

Key differences:

• Identity is blockchain-based, on Ethereum. Creating a new account costs money.

  You'll need to get a username, rent storage and add a key before you can use your account. These steps require many signatures and onchain transactions and can be tedious with a regular Ethereum wallet. We recommend starting with Warpcast, a special Farcaster wallet which will handle the entire flow for you.

• Human-friendly names are based on ENS. Off-chain names, aka "fnames," are provided free by the Farcaster company. Alternatively, you can bring your own ENS domain, which costs money, but is independent of Farcaster the company.
• Hubs run a gossip protocol to proactively synchronize data between each other and provide eventual consistency. Unlike Nostr, this means that it doesn't matter nearly as much which hub(s) you connect to as a user or client, nor do you need per-user relay hints, etc.

Also see https://neynar.com/ , popular third party Farcaster SDK.

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Creating an account looks a bit intimidating and blockchain heavy, and afaict costs $5, either one time or per year, with another $9/yr minimum for storage. Ugh. I wouldn't plan to subsidize that myself for people who want to bridge into Farcaster from other networks. Alternatively, they could make (and pay for) a normal Farcaster account and give Bridgy Fed the keys, but that's a lot of friction. Hrm.