Farcaster: Permissionless Identity and the Opportunity of Web3 Social

2023-11-23 13:39

Read this article in 13 Minutes

AI summary

View the summary

Original Title: "Farcaster: An Example of Permissionless Identity"

Original Author: Kerman Kohli

Translated by: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

As we all know, Vitalik has expressed his interest in decentralized social networking many times and has stated that "Farcaster is actually very successful." On October 12th, after three years of development, the decentralized social networking protocol Farcaster achieved 100% permissionless use. Any user with internet access and Ethereum can register and use Farcaster freely without relying on any other individuals or organizations.

Permissionless identity refers to an encrypted, portable, and persistent identity. Kerman Kohli, a cryptography researcher, uses Farcaster as an example to explore what permissionless identity is and how Farcaster achieves permissionless social networking. He pointed out that the development of Farcaster is only the tip of the iceberg, and there may be more Farcaster client competition for mindshare in the future, and may obtain venture capital to achieve large-scale returns.

I previously wrote an article that detailed what is permissionless identity and why it is important.

Now, I would like to give an example of an ecosystem or protocol and application. It is an excellent example of a permissionless identity and why it is superior to most of its counterparts in Web2.

Let's delve deeper into it.

Farcaster 101

I know that Web3 social is a somewhat outdated narrative, not everyone believes in it, but after paying attention to Farcaster in the past few weeks, I see hope.

Farcaster uses Ethereum as the identity layer and then uses a peer-to-peer distributed gossip network (called Hubs) to store messages. The following is an image from the documentation that explains the appearance of the Farcaster stack.

Please note that Farcaster is a protocol, while Warpcaster is a client and a specific implementation of Farcaster made by the team. The team's use of their own protocol to build their flagship product is crucial. This is a strategy that I believe every team building a protocol should adopt - you cannot outsource your first application. I saw a similar trend when I participated in DeFi in 2019.

Refreshing is that Web2 social media only enforces one client implementation of the protocol, which means that data is locked behind the API. This significantly limits your ability to manipulate data and, more importantly, limits your identity.

Farcaster and Unlicensed Identity

Let's take a fresh look at the definition of permissionless identity: "An encrypted identity that is portable, persistent, and supported by encryption."

Now imagine that all of your social data is portable and can be used in many different environments. And in social environments, you can leverage your identity on the public chain. Your identity in these two environments is unidirectional. I will explain in more detail below what this means.

Firstly, the identity module of Farcaster allows you to link multiple Ethereum addresses to your Farcaster ID, confirming the connection between wallets through signature. Once completed, all of your NFTs will be displayed on your profile.

"What's the big deal?" I hear you ask. The big deal is that when you access an NFT collection, you can find other Farcaster users who hold the same NFT and connect with them! How clever is that? Your on-chain identity holds the NFT, which can now seamlessly be used in your social Farcaster identity, fostering real social connections. NFTs are just the beginning. Imagine how many more use cases this could enable?

So above we were discussing the use of your on-chain identity in the context of the Warpcast application (Farcaster client). But what about using your Farcaster data in different clients?

Introduction to https://flink.fyi/

This is all the data displayed on Farcaster in a Reddit-style interface! This was completely independent of the original Farcaster team. Imagine being able to actually create a new social media site without having to move all your friends. For all those Web2 social media entrepreneurs who have been locked out of their ideas because of the social graph, this is such a rich opportunity.

Data Disclosure

In order to demonstrate the openness of your data, Dune has recently integrated Farcaster. Here is an example of a Dune dashboard that can provide analysis of all your activities (including deleted messages) from start to finish!

Dune Founder's (dwr) Dashboard

You can see some interesting details, such as the most loyal fans of the account, favorite users, and unresponsive users (one-sided users). For Dan, Qiao Wang and Vitalik don't seem to actively respond to him.

This is the promise that social networks should have. However, it has not been fulfilled due to the incentives of large technology companies that prevent the display of data.

Ecological System Integration

Up to now, I have mentioned the clients that connect with Farcaster. However, there is a very interesting application ecosystem that makes the experience more integrated and connected, namely Paragraph.xyz. You can think of it as the encrypted version of Substack, but more interconnected.

I posted this article on Paragraph, and now any comments about this article on Farcaster will be displayed on the local article on Paragraph! How clever! As a content creator, I always get frustrated with the stupid operations of having to copy and cross-publish a lot. Now there is finally a meaningful improvement direction.

Bountycaster, launched by Linda Xie, has recently been released as an integrated application for Farcaster. Unlike traditional bounty platforms, Bountycaster utilizes the social graph generated by Farcaster to establish stronger trust between trading users. This unique utilization of Farcaster and large public ledgers enables such applications to thrive.

It is precisely these things that make Farcaster's pattern relative to existing social media miraculous and refreshing. What we currently see is just the tip of the iceberg. There is more to come, and it is difficult to fully understand what other things may happen at this level of interoperability. I imagine that in the future, more Farcaster clients will begin to compete for mindshare and may even receive venture capital for large-scale returns. Although it is outrageous, it is indeed possible.

Conclusion

Overall, I am very excited about the opportunities that Farcaster brings to the table for non-permissioned identities and Web3 social interactions. Personally, I am tired of the games played by Twitter and Elon. I have spent many years building a social media account with nearly 10,000 followers, yet my posts only receive a maximum of 10 likes. Algorithms are my master, and as a creator, I am forced to submit to them. Enough is enough.

Farcaster is the last social network I will rely on, because in the worst case, my social graph can be easily exported to the next social network. While there may be risks in tweets that can never be deleted, I believe that in this era of false information in which we live, this will be more beneficial for humanity.