- The video discusses the world of decentralized social media and various platforms in the space.
- The founder of Farcaster, Dan Romero, is interviewed and discusses the differences between Farcaster and other players in the space.
- Farcaster recently reached a record number of active users and migrated to the Optimism Mainnet.
- The video also mentions FriendTech and its success in attracting creators from outside the crypto community.
- The importance of decentralized social media is highlighted, as it gives developers more control and allows users to have a direct relationship with their audience.
- The history of decentralized social media is briefly discussed, with various platforms mentioned.
- The video concludes by discussing the potential for decentralized social media to appeal to early adopters and those interested in decentralized platforms.

- The speaker discusses two approaches to decentralized social protocols: federated and blockchain-based.
- In the federated approach, each user has a home server and interoperability exists between servers. Admin privileges are held by the server hosting the user's account.
- The speaker prefers the blockchain-based approach, where user accounts are not tied to any specific server. The blockchain serves as a registry for user identities, allowing for a global state and removing the need for server maintenance.
- The federated system allows servers to decide if they want to interact with other servers, while the blockchain-based system eliminates the need for such decisions.
- The speaker criticizes the federated system for being difficult to scale and interact with as the network grows, requiring peering agreements.
- The speaker also discusses the potential for centralized control and censorship in federated systems, using Facebook as an example.
- They argue for building protocols that allow for competing clients, moderation, and algorithms, akin to the core principles of free speech.

- Growth is expected after a certain event, leading to growth with other clients
- There are commercial and open source alternatives to Warpcast
- Identity and authentication are important, especially with the centralization of authentication by major players like Google
- Forecaster uses FID or Caster ID to assign a numerical number to users and map a username to it
- Forecaster allows users to associate multiple Ethereum addresses with their FID
- Forecaster aims to become a meta concept for identity across multiple addresses
- Identity layers are emergent and multiple identity systems can coexist
- Developers will decide what constitutes identity and pull from different projects
- Mass adoption of an application will drive the adoption of its identity system
- Coinbase is well-positioned to do identity with its large number of KYC accounts.

- Coinbase has 100 million KYC accounts, making it a valuable platform for identity verification
- Identity value comes from having a large active user base, not just the best technical specifications
- Apple ID is becoming the standard identity for crypto mobile apps due to its ease of use and control over personal information
- Ethereum was chosen as the best ecosystem for Farcaster due to its active developer community and interest in decentralized social protocols
- The decision to use the OP stack on Ethereum was influenced by the momentum and user base of projects like Coinbase's Base and Zora
- The OP mainnet was chosen over launching a separate chain due to the ecosystem's potential for improvement and the ability to migrate in the future if needed
- Farcaster has been running on a testnet for three years and the move to a mainnet was inspired by projects like Dark Forest that started on testnets before moving to a mainnet.

- Testnet is underrated for consumer apps without a financial element, as it allows for faster innovation without the risk of real money.
- FriendTech has had significant growth and is experimenting with social products.
- FriendTech's use of PWA change allows for a better user experience and the ability to bypass app store taxes.
- FriendTech's use of Privy and abstracting away private keys is considered best in class.
- The crypto UX on mobile is expected to improve with the abstraction of mnemonics and the use of tools like Privy.
- Lens is more on-chain than FriendTech and utilizes natively on-chain elements.
- Scaling a blockchain-based social platform like Lens may be challenging due to the amount of data generated.
- Farcaster aims to keep things simple with a small on-chain footprint and a storage contract system.
- The quality of conversations on Farcaster is perceived to be higher than on Lens, but Lens may have more active users.
- The curator spends more time curating conversations on Farcaster compared to Lens.

- The speaker believes that Warpcasts have more curated conversations compared to Lens, which feels messier.
- They believe that allowing the market to develop different clients and apps while focusing on building the core protocol and infrastructure is a reasonable strategy.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of building a user base and attracting developers through quality daily active users.
- They compare their approach to Apple's strategy with the iPhone, where they built an app and gained a large user base before introducing third-party apps.
- The speaker mentions the importance of building a distinct culture and slow growth to avoid culture fraying.
- They discuss the potential of incentivizing usage but question the value of strictly incentivizing users for money or airdrops.
- The speaker believes that the best people on social media are not primarily incentivized by monetary rewards but by building status and audience.
- They discuss the potential of curating a small group of super fans but argue that the desire for virality and wide reach is still prevalent.
- The speaker mentions the launch of channels on Warpcast, which are similar to subreddits and allow users to create topic-based communities.

- The Channels feature on Warpcast combines elements of Reddit and Twitter in a topic-based community.
- Channels has been successful in increasing the number of posts and reengaging users.
- The potential for dedicated apps or experiences for specific channels is promising.
- The scalability of Warpcast hubs is designed to handle a large number of users.
- Users are required to pay for storage to reduce spam and fund the development of the protocol.
- The founders advise having a long-term perspective and understanding that success takes time in the crypto space.

- The video discusses decentralized social media platforms and their importance in giving developers more control and users a direct relationship with their audience.
- Farcaster, a decentralized social media platform, recently reached a record number of active users and migrated to the Optimism Mainnet.
- The speaker prefers the blockchain-based approach to decentralized social protocols, as it eliminates the need for server maintenance and allows for a global state.
- The federated system, on the other hand, is criticized for being difficult to scale and potentially enabling centralized control and censorship.
- Farcaster uses FID or Caster ID to assign numerical numbers to users and aims to become a meta concept for identity across multiple addresses.
- Mass adoption of an application will drive the adoption of its identity system, and platforms like Coinbase and Apple ID are seen as valuable for identity verification.
- Farcaster chose Ethereum as the best ecosystem for its platform and opted for the OP mainnet due to its potential for improvement and migration capabilities.
- FriendTech and Lens are other decentralized social media platforms mentioned in the video, with FriendTech experimenting with social products and Lens being more on-chain.
- Farcaster aims to keep things simple with a small on-chain footprint and emphasizes the importance of building a user base and attracting developers.
- The launch of channels on Warpcast, similar to subreddits, has been successful in increasing engagement and the potential for dedicated apps for specific channels is promising.
- The scalability of Warpcast hubs is designed to handle a large number of users, and users are required to pay for storage to reduce spam and fund protocol development.
- The video concludes by advising a long-term perspective and understanding that success takes time in the crypto space.

- The speaker advises that success takes time and compounding in the crypto market due to its volatility.
- The speaker shares a lesson learned from building Farcaster, emphasizing the importance of focusing on users with fewer than 10,000 followers on Twitter.
- The speaker discusses the different dynamics of the status game and financialized game in social media platforms.
- The speaker mentions the manual onboarding process for Farcaster and the importance of curating the community for an authentic experience.
- The speaker talks about the potential unbundling of Twitter and Reddit into dedicated apps for specific topics.
- The speaker highlights the issue of content moderation and the emergence of alternative platforms for users who have been de-platformed.
- The speaker speculates on the possibility of niche channels growing to the point of warranting their own dedicated apps.

- Building a client for a specific niche allows for dedicated features tailored to that community
- Parler and Truth could potentially be built on an open platform for their own dedicated communities
- Twitter's limited user base may be due to the types of conversations that happen on the platform
- Farcaster needs to solve problems related to authentication, identity, availability, and consistency
- Building a community first is important before focusing on authentication
- Coinbase is well positioned to become the identity layer in crypto
- Founders should do things that don't scale and learn from their users
- Farcaster has around 20,000 users without incentives, but may consider introducing incentivization in the future
- Farcaster v3 includes hubs that hold user data and there is a $5 fee per year for using the hub
- Sharding and lowering costs for onboarding users may be considered in the future
- Permissionless signups will be available in a month for Farcaster

- The use of permissioned signups in Farcaster helps create a critical mass and meaningful conversations among a specific group of users.
- The invite code system in Frantech creates FOMO and a sense of exclusivity.
- The move to the OP stack in Farcaster is not surprising, as many West Coast ecosystems are on OP.
- The decision to choose OP mainnet over building an AppChain is due to the early stage of tooling and the tech risk involved.
- The design choices in Farcaster, such as staying on testnet for three years and prioritizing composability on Mainnet, are interesting.
- The OP stack is becoming a de facto consumer chain due to signals from Coinbase, Worldcoin, and FrontTech.
- The future of the OP stack may involve app chains with interoperability.
- Different centralized exchanges have launched their own layer 2 solutions, targeting specific geographic regions.
- AltLayer, a startup from the Asia ecosystem, is using an unknown stack.
- Roll-ups that are geographic-focused may have unique composability aspects.
- Overall, it was a great conversation and the hosts will be back next week.

- Success in the crypto market takes time and compounding due to its volatility.
- Focusing on users with fewer than 10,000 followers on Twitter is important for building a successful platform.
- Social media platforms have different dynamics in the status game and financialized game.
- Farcaster emphasizes the importance of manual onboarding and curating the community for an authentic experience.
- Twitter and Reddit may be unbundled into dedicated apps for specific topics.
- Content moderation is a concern, leading to the emergence of alternative platforms for de-platformed users.
- Niche channels may grow enough to warrant their own dedicated apps.
- Building a client for a specific niche allows for tailored features.
- Coinbase could become the identity layer in crypto.
- Founders should focus on user feedback and do things that don't scale.
- Farcaster has around 20,000 users without incentives, but may introduce incentivization in the future.
- Farcaster v3 includes hubs with a $5 fee per year for using the hub.
- Lowering costs for onboarding users and sharding may be considered in the future.
- Permissionless signups will be available in a month for Farcaster.
- Permissioned signups in Farcaster create meaningful conversations among a specific group of users.
- The invite code system in Frantech creates exclusivity and FOMO.
- The OP stack is becoming a popular consumer chain, with potential app chains for interoperability.
- Different centralized exchanges have launched their own layer 2 solutions for specific regions.
- AltLayer from the Asia ecosystem is using an unknown stack.
- Roll-ups focused on specific regions may have unique composability aspects.

Imran and Qiao sit down with Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster and Warpcast, for a deep dive into the world of decentralized social media.
No BS crypto insight for founders.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
00:38 Welcome to Good Game
03:33 Imran's experience with Friend.tech so far
04:46 Start of the interview with Dan 
05:15 Quick background on Dan
05:34 What is decentralized social media and why is it important?
07:21 An example of being deplatformed
13:28 Who decides if a user is going to get banned by the rest of the network?
19:28 Is there any client that can rival Warpcast today?
20:31 The technical implementation of Farcaster
32:48 Why move to OP stack?
37:12 Why choose OP mainnet instead of launching your own chain?
40:45 Qiao: What do you think of Friend.tech?
45:20 How about Lens?
49:18 Comparing Farcaster and Lens from a user's POV
55:03 Imran: How do you view incentivized usage?
58:51 Imran: Where do you see Warpcast/Farcast go to get the average normie to switch from Twitter to Warpcast?
01:03:28 How do we think about Twitter-like scale?
01:08:42 Dan's advice for founders
01:10:00 Dan's #1 lesson he learned from building Farcaster
01:11:53 Imran and Qiao's learnings
01:15:02 Qiao interviewed Farcaster users
01:32:02 The move to OP stack

Dan Romero Twitter: https://twitter.com/dwr

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3N675w3
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3snLsxU
Website: https://goodgamepod.xyz
Twitter: https://twitter.com/goodgamepodxyz

Web3 Founders:
Apply to Alliance: https://alliance.xyz/
Alliance Twitter: https://twitter.com/alliancedao

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed herein are personal to the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or entity. Discussions and answers to questions are intended as generalized, non-personalized information. Nothing herein should be construed or relied upon as investment, legal, tax, or other advice.

Welcome to Good Game, your no BS insights for crypto founders.

If you've got a banger meme or tweet, you're going to put that in your small group because they pay it?

Or do you want to go and try to go to get the 20,000 likes or whatever?

Like, oh yeah, I'm like so fed up with Twitter or too many bots.

All these things that people complain about when you have the banger, you want it to go viral.

Looking for your next startup idea in crypto?

Check out our request for startups list and get inspired at alliance.xyz forward slash ideas.

Today we have Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster that's gonna be coming on the air here soon.

And what we want to talk about is, you know, the world of decentralized social.

We have Frontek, we have Lens, we have Farcaster.

And then, you know, if you want to talk about Facebook and Meta, they have Threads.

And you have, you know, about a decade's worth of like decentralized social experiments that has been taking place.

So I think what we wanna, like, what we wanna learn more or less about is like, you know, what is Farcaster doing that's different than all of these other players in the space?

And like, is this going to be the only client?

How are they thinking about third party ecosystem?

And I do want to get into more of the technical details because I think it's important as you're thinking about the types of products and features that you want your end users to see.

So first of all, Forecaster reached a record data active users basically today.

They've been growing pretty consistently in the last few months.

We'd love to hear from him, from Dan, how he got to this point and what his points are next.

And the second thing is he announced that he's going to Optimism Mainnet.

Actually, he just migrated, just finished the migration to Optimism Mainnet.

For those who have not paid attention to Optimism, the price action of Optimism has been crazy strong in the last few weeks, and for good reasons, obviously.

Zora launched their own AppChain on the OP stack.

Coinbase launched their own L2 as base on the OP stack as well.

Obviously, Farcaster is doing something different.

They're launching on the Optimism mainnet rather than as an app chain of their own on the OP stack.

So I'd love to hear from him why he made that decision.

And finally, there's obviously FriendTech, which has been going really well.

Matter of fact, I think FriendTech might be the first crypto consumer app, crypto social app that made it outside of the crypto natives, meaning there's actually creators from, for example, OnlyFans that joined FriendTag and became really active there.

I'd love to hear his thoughts on FriendTag and other competitors in crypto.

Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting, right?

I mean, Farcaster has been around for 3 years and they're very focused on like, creating an authentic community, right?

Like When you log on to Warpcast, you see people engaging.

I asked a couple of days ago to get an invite for Warpcast for someone that I know, and within minutes I had someone reply back, hey, I can help you.

It's very different in terms of the engagement that you can get within Warpcast.

And then if you look at Front Tech, Front Tech is also interesting.

And what I find here is that, you know, my behavior changes in the way I interact with my users, right?

I tend to write long form, much more long form content.

I don't know why this happens, but it turns out, you know, Koby, I bought his key as well, or yeah, your key.

He said like, I don't know why, but I find myself writing longer and longer content.

And he said that he also noticed that from other users as well.

And so it could very much be that, you know, front-end tech is a completely different social experience that is far different from what Warpcast and Firecaster is building.

And it could be true that both can coexist and do really well, despite the fact there's overlap in the social media, decentralized social media.

Well, why don't we bring on Dan and talk about some of these details.

Today we have Dan Romero, the founder of Barcaster and Warpcast, on to speak about the current state of decentralized social media and talk a bit about where he sees the landscape, you know, as a founder, what are some of the aspects that you went through in terms of bootstrapping his first 100 to 1,000 customers?

And then really just dive deep into the technical aspects of Barcaster and how it's different from Lens and you have threads using ActivityPub, et cetera.

Dan worked at Coinbase for 5 years before starting Broadcaster and has spent almost 3 or 4 years working on Broadcaster and Warp Death.

And so maybe talking about generally, like what is a decentralized social media?

Like why is it important in the world that we live in today?

And yeah, and then maybe we can start with that.

The reason I'm excited about decentralized social networks is it brings back freedom and control for 2 specific audiences.

So if you build an application, those users that you work hard to to kind of like earn that relationship is direct.

So you don't have some corporate strategy like Twitter or Facebook changing its kind of API strategy and then, and then disintermediating you.

And then the second audience, which I think on, on average is probably not as big of an issue, but, but in some prominent examples, it's become an issue.

Is if, if you've worked hard to build an audience, right.

You know, I spent 10 years building up a following.

If you do that on Twitter or YouTube, depending on the whims of that platform, whether it's a single individual owning it or, you know, it's a committee of people, they can just disappear your audience overnight.

You can't sue them in court and say, hey, I want to have the ability to export my YouTube subscribe list.

No, that's part of their terms of service.

It's like you're at their leisure with that audience.

And contrast to something like Substack, which is built on a web 1 kind of open protocol, if Substack for whatever reason was to say, hey, we don't want you to use Substack anymore, it would be ridiculous to think that they would withhold the email list from you.

And so I think that there's some convention there, But I think also the architecture of these protocols matter.

And so I think what I'm excited about with building Farcaster is getting us to a world where developer has the freedom to innovate and the right to earn their user base.

And then likewise, if you're a person with an audience, you have a more direct relationship with your audience.

perfect example of being deplatformed, that's the term.

So Donald Trump was, a while ago was deplatformed.

I got hacked via a SIM swab and I couldn't verify myself.

So I basically lost access to my Twitter, which I spent 4 years building.

Even though I'd want everyone to use Farkaster, go to your Twitter settings, remove 2FA from phone number and move it over to something like Google Authenticator.

It will happen to you, especially if you're in crypto.

You know, the history of decentralized social media actually goes back quite a while.

I wasn't aware of this, but it goes back to like 2010.

You had Diaspora that used, it was similar framework as ActivityPub.

You had Ostatus, you have then ActivityPub, then Secure Scuttlebot, and then Pipit.

So maybe like walk us through like, why this, you know, why has this been lingering on?

And then maybe we could start with that and what were some of the pros and cons of what they did and why maybe the opportunity is now.

So I think it's worth, there are 2 separate issues there.

So first is, if you're the average user, none of this actually matters to you.

What you care about is being entertained, following your favorite celebrity.

Web 2 is going to work completely fine for you.

Your favorite creators are already on YouTube, they're on Twitter for the most part, and I think you don't care about this stuff.

So let's just get that out of the way, as this is not applying to normies today.

It's similar to Linux in the sense that if you over a decade do this thing right, it either is invisibly behind the scenes, or you've built the momentum that, you know.

So the example there being that Linux powers both Android and Unix powers iOS.

So yes, desktop and Linux never happen against Windows, but every mobile device in the world runs some version of a Nix client, right?

So putting that to the side, I think if you're focused on early adopters and people who might have an ideological inclination to try out something decentralized, developers who might find that interesting.

So why would you approach the different architectures the way they do?

So I think that the simplest delineation is you can either approach it in a federated way, which is what most of the social, decentralized social protocols have approached it, which essentially in some ways, think of it as almost like email.

So you, you have the concept of a home server.

That kind of meshes with other servers with some interoperability and the server that you choose, whether you host it yourself or someone hosts it for you, has kind of admin privileges over your account.

Vernon and I grew up at Coinbase in the sense that like we think actually cryptocurrency blockchain architecture is a pretty fascinating way to do it in the sense that the state, the account doesn't live on any 1 server, it lives on the network.

And so where we've approached Farcaster is actually modeling it on something much more like Bitcoin or Ethereum, right?

And so the idea is that no 1 server is your home.

You actually use the blockchain to kind of have a simple registry to say, this user is associated with this public key, which there's a private key that proves that you are that.

And then the whole system after that works off that mapping and that can live outside of any 1 server, which gives you a couple of nice properties.

So the first is no 1 has admin control over you, right?

So there are plenty of instances of like, if you're on Macedon, for example, you could be banned for being a capitalist or whatever, like, you know, the term...

And whatever, like that's the right, right?

But more importantly, And I actually think if we think about this from the developer perspective, Federation is actually a very difficult system to interact with as that system scales, because inevitably, you're now going to have thousands of servers that you need to kind of maintain state for.

So in order to build an application that kind of takes in the kind of like full global state of the network You have to actually build a mini version of Google, right?

And it might be a little bit easier than that because the the you know relative to Google and how many web pages there are There are fewer number of servers, but you know, for example blue sky which has a very similar architecture 80 proto To Macedon some slight differences has already indicated that as the network scales, developers are going to need something called peering agreements to get access to the data.

But peering agreement is a special agreement, like You get access to this set of APIs, and obviously to get the firehose, that would require you to negotiate a deal with them, sign some terms of service.

And so as the network grows, it gets less and less permissionless over time.

Contrast that to something like Farcaster, which again is modeled after something like Ethereum or Bitcoin.

Farcaster, all of the data that's not on-chain, and we can talk about that later, lives in something called the Farcaster Hub.

The Farcaster Hub has the entire global state of the Farcaster network within reason at any given moment, similar to an Ethereum node or a Bitcoin node having the full global state of that blockchain at any given moment.

And our point of view is that is the thing to actually go build, And that's actually somewhat uniquely enabled by cryptocurrency blockchains in the sense that if you can remove the accounts from the server, then the server can just focus on the content and then the kind of like identity can actually live on something outside of a server.

And you can actually get to some version of global state.

That's actually the, the core architectural difference between Forecaster and the kind of like federated versions of things.

So just to double click on that in the federated system, who decides if a user is going to get banned by the rest of the network?

So the first is, and I think activity pub world, and I'm not an expert here, but this is my general understanding, you actually can just boot up a new server, but the other servers can choose to de-federate with you.

So now the kind of access to the network is based on the kind of, if you think of it, there may be some, you know, call it 10 core activity pub instances, which now, if Threads actually falls through on becoming an ActivityPub instance, they basically are 90% of the network, even with the decrease in devs, right?

But in those worlds, each of those instances can decide to peer with you or not.

So let's say you boot up your own ActivityPub instance, no 1 has to peer with you.

So you're not guaranteed to kind of get any content put into that network.

In AT Proto, they have a work in progress spec that's using something called DIDs and verified credentials.

And they actually have something called Placeholder, which if you squint at it, they're basically trying to come up with a consortium that looks like DNS, which there's a lot of work there to try to make a version of a blockchain registry without using the word blockchain.

Because I think within the AT Proto world, at least my understanding is like crypto is bad and you wouldn't want to ever use crypto for anything because it's all grips and scams.

What you think some people have just like this kind of delusion in their brain that just because there's a word cryptocurrency like You know you have that where is I think what we've approached with is a theory I'm a global computer that actually can serve the purpose of creating a decentralized kind of verifiable.

Identity registry that if you think about it it's like a database where each user is the admin for their single row in the database, and you can actually design it so that there's no actual like super admin that has access to the whole database.

So you can put a non-upgradable contract, your identity on Farcaster is controlled, you know, the right access to that 1 row is your Ethereum private key.

So let's play devil's advocate and say that Threads holds 1 of the instance in this federated world.

And let's say Mark is like, you know what?

I don't want our followers or our users interacting with the server, they can de-federate, right?

So they have the most control in that platform.

Like they could do whatever they want because they have all the users, right?

Yes, and I fully expect whatever version of Meta's ActivityPub integration will be, I promise you that they're not going to allow you to permissionlessly suck all of the threads graph out.

So they're gonna have some version of they might federate the content out or you can federate your content in, but that just like everything with Facebook, I think it's going to be a controlled black box, right?

It's like the big myth everyone always has, Facebook's selling my data.

Facebook never lets your data leave Facebook.

What you can do is you can pay Facebook to target people on Facebook, but the data actually stays inside Facebook.

fair, I'm kind of like hypothesizing on what I think they're going to do.

But knowing a history of Facebook, I do not think that they're going to allow a leaky data abstraction of their entire threads graph.

If so, then you're going to have a whole bunch of other people using that to help bootstrap their own graphs.

Or connecting with servers that their mission doesn't align with, right?

You start with the extreme, like, oh, well, of course I don't want to connect to a neo-Nazi activity.

But then it like works its way and and and then it's like, wait a second, like we started with like, the thing that 99.9% of people agree with, to now it's 80%, to now it's, you know, threads is deciding what what is good versus bad and I think we've run into these issues before right and so you know COVID I think is a great example of this where you know we watched the COVID discourse change like 3 or 4 times.

It was like hard to keep track It's like depending on who's in office like who's saying what but the reality is there was a period of time While the goal though we were going through a global pandemic That like the 3 or 4 major internet platforms in the United States decided this is what was this the allowed discourse on COVID period and it's like a couple years later we've turned out it's like the government has even changed his opinion on that and so it's like this is kind of weird that we're so centralized in terms of like what we can talk about, especially for a topic that's that's extremely relevant for having public discourse, right?

And so I'm less on the like, this is what speech should be allowed as much as building protocols that allow for competing clients, moderation, algorithms.

It's actually much more akin to our, like the core first amendment rights we have in the country, right?

Like imagine if there were only 10 newspapers And those 10 newspapers got to decide, you know, or 3 television stations, which we used to have, right?

Versus like, of course, like we have a whole kind of spectrum of news sources, right?

So you can get a left-wing news source, you can get a right-wing news source, you can try to find a centrist.

But the idea is that they can all compete.

Whereas when you have these large centralized platforms, it's much more akin to having 3 television stations.

And, you know, that's the acceptable amount of speech.

And so I think what's important is getting to a place where if you feel like there's an underserved need in the market, you as a developer, an entrepreneur, content creator, have the ability to go try that and earn your audience in the marketplace.

So just a really quick question on that, just in case we derail from this conversation.

But what is the largest client on top of Farcaster that remotely rivals Warpcast, which is your own client?

Is there any such client that can rival Warpcast today?

There are definitely a few other clients.

The reality is 99% of users are using Warpcast.

Although we just migrated to OPMainnet yesterday, which is exciting.

But the kind of like permissionless sign-up era of Farcaster, where you can just go and interact with the contract.

So that's, that's a couple of weeks away.

So I would imagine after that happens, you're going to start to see growth.

I'll be slow to start, but growth with other clients, because they're going to have an experience where you don't have to use forecasts, Every user today has signed up on the kind of protocol during the beta period through Warpcast.

But I think what's important is, 1, there are a couple of commercial alternatives.

So there's a company called Jam that they have a fully featured forecaster client.

There are some open source alternatives, right?

There's 1 project called Opencast being built.

And I would imagine as the network grows, the incentive to actually create an alternative to Warpcast will grow as well.

So maybe this could be a good segue into like talking about the technical implementation of Broadcaster in fact, I spent some time and watch all of our ruins like 5 minute videos that yes It's I mean to me that's like awesome, right?

Because like whenever I study, you know developer dogs, you know breathing through is great, but you missed a lot of nuance So I appreciated those 5 minute videos.

And so there are 4 things he talked about that he wants to solve with Forecast, right?

Identity, authentication, availability, consistency.

And so I really wanna talk about identity because I feel like, you know, obviously, B3 has changed and you guys are migrating to CCID.

But maybe talk about what is the plan with identity and authentication?

And the reason why I'm talking about this is because, you know, we had some instances of like, if you look at what's happening today, like everything has been centralized to like Google authentication, right?

Like with OAuth login, so like it's either going to be Google, Facebook Connect or like Amazon or etc.

So I feel like a lot of the power for identity and authentication is being shifted to like 3 or 4 major players in the ecosystem.

And so I'm curious on like the technical implementation of identity, right?

I know you use FID or Caster ID, which essentially assigns a numerical number to the user and then it maps a username to it.

And so maybe talk a bit about the identity piece on how that works with the new implementation of CCID and sub DNS domains.

And then where do you see this all going from an ecosystem perspective?

Do you want people to use Forecaster ID as a login method?

Yeah, so I think it's worth working it up from first principles.

And this is kind of informed by 3 years of a beta where I spent a lot of time talking to users and Verun and I and the team think through kind of like from a developer experience standpoint.

So let's use centralized social media as kind of the reference point for what does a consumer expect when they're actually having some version of identity on a social platform.

So the first thing is users actually want the ability to upgrade their username.

Like that's a kind of rite of passage for a lot of folks.

Maybe you start and you have like a couple numbers at the end of your username and then over time, maybe you get bigger.

You decide like from a business standpoint, you want to acquire a different handle and simplify things or, you know, make it look cooler.

Seems small, but that's actually important.

And in a world where you decide to map everything to a username, and if the system is decentralized, you cannot force all of the other people to move their follows.

So now you run into this little bit of a conundrum where I have, you know, 100,000 people following me, but they're all following a specific name.

How do you actually go do that in a system where every user is effectively in control of their actions?

Twitter could do that, but you can't necessarily.

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Is Decentralized Social Media Worth the Effort?