Bankless Can Farcaster make encrypted socializing a reality?

Can Farcaster Revolutionize Socializing through Encrypted Technology?

Source: Bankless Translation: LianGuaiBitpushNews Mary Liu

Last week, the permissionless decentralized social protocol Farcaster officially launched, taking a big step forward for crypto social. Twitter/X remains a major communication platform for the crypto community, so how can the vision of web3 convince more people?

This article will delve into Farcaster and its prospects.

In a year of downturn in the cryptocurrency industry, crypto social games seem to have made some progress in 2023.

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“Crypto social” here refers to web3 applications centered around social connections. For example, friend.tech recently gained attention with its crypto-native version of super chats, where you can buy Keys of your favorite influencers to have the opportunity to chat with them individually.

This use case is very appealing, and friend.tech’s popularization of PWA mobile stack has also been recognized by the market. But one problem is that not everyone has enough ETH to pay for their favorite KOL.

This year, another attractive emergence in crypto social is Lens, a web3 social graph protocol focusing on data portability. Users can enjoy a range of apps supported by Lens, such as Orb, Hey, Tape, and more.

The vision of Lens V2 is also eye-catching, as it will act as a wallet using ERC-6551 and facilitate all web3 activities through Open Actions. The problem is that Lens V2 has yet to be released, and V1 currently has a waiting list.

Another large crypto social project that has recently gained attention is Farcaster.

Farcaster made headlines with the launch of its permissionless registration. Account creation is managed on Optimism L2, so registration fees are very “wallet-friendly”. Like Lens, Farcaster is a protocol that supports decentralized applications, and users can interact with Farcaster in various ways.

Of course, this decentralized portability approach is the cornerstone of Farcaster’s design, as it enhances user control over data (in contrast to the data silos of web2 platforms) and promotes permissionless app development (as opposed to centralized “walled-garden” app stores).

But what does this decentralized design look like in practice?

For example, if you were banned from an Ethereum-centric Reddit subreddit for sharing your own article because the moderator deemed it spam, you might want to quit Reddit, but you have a lot of history on that old account. The best approach would be to port that data to another social media platform to continue development on top of it, but that’s not feasible because Reddit’s data is exclusive.

In contrast, Farcaster is an open protocol that can be used to build various encrypted social applications. One such application is flink.fyi, which is a Farcaster pure web client similar to Reddit. As of the time of writing this article, it dominates in terms of registrations, possibly due to its familiar user interface and affordable annual fee of around $7.

Furthermore, assuming you don’t like Flink’s UI or are tired of its lack of development progress, users have the option to switch to another Farcaster application, such as Warpcast which is similar to Twitter, and still be able to build within the same social graph.

For users, this portability is very attractive as there are always people who don’t want their social interactions confined to one platform, or endure Elon Musk’s wild and nonsensical tweets on X.

With Farcaster, users can choose to join and leave applications at will while keeping their underlying social data intact on the blockchain. Of course, Musk can change the settings of his X account at any time, but he cannot steal or insert ENS names into the Farcaster ecosystem. That is the power and promise of encrypted social media and empowering radical users.

As a web3 system, Farcaster can also serve as a springboard for users to explore cryptocurrencies. For example, Warpcast has dedicated channels that showcase NFT minting in ways that traditional social media platforms have not exhibited to date.

Thus, both horizontally and vertically, projects like Farcaster can become significant catalysts for the future of encrypted social scenes. They support the unique experiences and data ownership that cryptonatives crave while being open enough to support the creation of applications that can attract a wider audience.

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