Farcaster represents a new wave of innovation for the Web3 consumer. Permissionless, composable, & sufficiently decentralized, Farcaster is a social graph that provides infrastructure to facilitate the formation of other novel Web3 social platforms. The protocol is designed to empower creators to own the links between themselves and their network, forming a fully composable, user-owned social map. The protocol is built with a focus on segmentation, so that users can always have the freedom to move their social identity between applications, and developers will always have the freedom to build applications with new features on the network.

This is one of the topics that I recently discussed in a thread on some interesting areas of opportunity within Web3.

What’s wrong with the status quo? Today, users are vied over in a perpetual war with social media and content platforms for their attention. This battle has been deemed by many the “attention economy” referring of course to the fact that revenue is driven based on the amount of time users spend on any given platform.

Why is this bad?

• The revenue model is bad because it encourages predatory algorithms that aren’t meant to connect users but rather to keep users engaged
• Creators can’t capture any upside in the value that they create for the platforms that they produce content on
• Users do not own their social networks. They rent them via the platforms they choose to spend their attention on.

Logically, the next question is why should we care? Instagram may keep us addicted to a constant stream of attention-grabbing content, but it also affords us ultra-connectivity. Should we really care if we own this dynamic?

The short answer is absolutely. The number of individuals who are making a living from creating content has gone completely parabolic over the last few years. In the US, the number of creators earning a living wage has increased 41% year-over-year (2021). The “creator economy” is in full swing. But the “ownership economy” has some catching up to do insofar as allowing creators to not simply be the creator, but also the owner.

Imagine yourself a renowned fine artist – your art is in every major gallery in the world, but you retain no ownership over your work as soon as it’s hung for display. It doesn’t make any sense. This is the world we live in today, where creators trade exposure for ownership.

Everyone knows how that one pans out:

As someone with familial roots in fine art (my grandma Liz has been a recognized gallery-represented artist for over 40 years - you can find her work here), it would be a true punch in the gut to be a creator with these economics. For creators, all of the above pose serious risks to their businesses and livelihoods. As creators continue to build businesses and networks of their own, it’s becoming an urgent issue.

The solutions to these problems inherent to the “old internet” can be found by combing through some history. Let’s rewind to the Italian Renaissance. I look to Paula Findlen, a professor of Italian History at Stanford University, who insightfully explores the mechanisms that helped to foster the Renaissance.

Some of the defining characteristics of the Italian Renaissance were that:

• It brought about the creation of new methods of making things → art meets engineering
• It supported new kinds of patronage → the emergence of a variety of different infrastructures of support and investment

As we saw with DeFi, consumer social applications require a design space in order to really gain tailwinds for adoption. Farcaster represents an innovation to propagate new social applications by providing a developer sandbox environment for new projects and does so through new frameworks that seek to benefit all users of the technology.

A Shifting Landscape

Given the need for disruption, there are also a host of market trends that indicate a need. Some of the major market trends that are beginning to gain traction for consumer applications in Web3:

• Data portability, the design space of the Web3 consumer application layer
• Social graphs determined by proven participation rather than attention
• The need for a valuable early user base
• Acceleration of new forms of patronage

Let’s dive in:

Data portability → Farcaster solves for the critical risk of censorship associated with centralized social platforms that exist in the status quo. As the true owners of their content, creators on Farcaster no longer need to worry about losing their content, audience, and livelihood based on the writ of an individual platform's algorithms and policies. Farcaster differentiates itself from the incumbent social network model by fostering an ecosystem which can be accessed by any creator without the risk of being deplatformed.

Social graphs determined by proven participation → Farcaster uses existing on-chain participation to suggest other users and profiles to interact with. Current profiles range from individuals, to DAOs, to communities. At scale, this creates an environment for burgeoning interest groups to connect over their mutual interests be it in art, NFTs, music, entertainment, education, DeFi, etc. Users can already interact based on shared ownership of NFTs.

Community-driven early user base → Critical to the early growth of any social platform is its early user base. As an example, Facebook was a community of select Ivy League undergrads before it became an international social network for everyone. There had to be an initial group that drove interest to join. Farcaster has curated a group of top-notch crypto native users who form to create what their team asserts is:

“a skin-in-the-game social network that’s not just about what you say but also about what you can prove on-chain.”

Acceleration of new forms of patronage → At scale, we can imagine the Farcaster ecosystem to include groups of fans and patrons congregating on Farcaster-supported platforms. These users will authenticate their support of certain creators through ownership of unique NFTs and other tokenized digital assets. Unlike Web2 competitors, Farcaster is able to leverage the framework of what Li Jin refers to as “patronage-plus” to build incentive mechanisms of support as a stakeholder not just altruistically but as an owner.

It’s hard to imagine a world without the consumer social media platforms that many of us have grown up using daily. It would seem ridiculous for us to give it all up for something else. But what would seem equally ridiculous is for a growing share of the labor market to not own the assets that they create or participate in any value capture on the upside.

Sources & Additional Reading

• Read more about Farcaster here
• Indexing the Creator Economy | Stripe
• Index Creator Summit: The Past & Present Renaissance | Index Ventures

Thanks to Dan Romero for giving me the opportunity to be an early user of Farcaster. Really excited about the future of social that your team is building.