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by seanwbren 864 days ago
Farcaster is a decentralized social network, much like Twitter but with Channels (which are similar to subreddits). All the data is open.

A cryptographic signing key is attached to each account, and they have been experiencing very fast growth over the past month.

A dashboard is possible to share because the data is open: https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster
2 comments
INTPenis 864 days ago
What's the role of Ethereum in farcaster? I noticed it in the design Overview but I don't really have the time or motivation to get deeper.
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pa7x1 864 days ago
Your identity is on Ethereum (a rollup on top of it being a bit more precise). So stuff like this https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/26/twitter-now-x-took-over-th... cannot happen.
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INTPenis 864 days ago
Yeah I read a bit further and realized it's tied to Ethereum. But there seems to be an on-chain and off-chain design that I don't get.

Either way I'm staying away from anything that's tied to a crypto coin. I know Ethereum is also contracts, but I just feel that crypto is tainted with scams. If a technology wants to use a block chain, fine, but why tie it to a monetary value? That's when you start stepping over the line of tech and into people's life savings.

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pa7x1 863 days ago
That feels a bit like throwing the baby with the bathwater. Ethereum provides a global, permissionless public key infrastructure. Then on top of that it has the token for payments, and the smart contract functionality to build whatever.

Farcaster simply taps onto the PKI part, to assign an identity that the user can own. That seems to be pretty legitimate use case. And you don't get any exposure to a token. In fact, you don't need to know any of those technicalities. Besides knowing that your identity and social graph (who you follow, who follows you, likes, etc...) cannot be rugpulled from you. Which seems pretty neat.

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INTPenis 863 days ago
But immutable identities are possible without having it tied to money.

It's the fact that people are investing money, losing money, gaining money with this coin, that is bothering me. As soon as there is money to gain people become very manipulative.

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r721 864 days ago
>Minimizing bot activity: Farcaster requires that new users pay a $5 sign-up fee, aimed at preventing the creation of spam accounts, and limits users to a restricted number of “casts” tied to paid “storage units.”

https://decrypt.co/resources/farcaster-explained-the-blockch...

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