Original author: katiewav
Original Source: Mirror
原文标题：Reflections on FarCon 2024
编译：TechFlow, 深潮
The FarCon conference set off a storm of excitement and optimism. The atmosphere was exhilarating, and it felt amazing to be fully on-chain in place. I was also blown away by the high quality of projects I had the opportunity to review at FarHack. It's clear that talented developers of all stripes, from native Farcaster founders to freelance developers to media enthusiasts, are eager to build on Farcaster, and this enthusiasm is contagious and should not be underestimated.
However, a more nuanced point is that I think many people leave FarCon with more questions than answers. A lot of familiar ideas and concepts were discussed throughout the weekend, almost to the point of painful repetition. A controversial question also hangs in the air: can a truly decentralized, positive-sum social network exist while still largely being helmed by a team (with good intentions)?
I'd like to share some of my own initial reflections here – from the most frequently discussed issues I've heard, to what I'm interested in seeing emerge from the Farcaster community, to my general framework for consumer-grade crypto products.
Is the infrastructure ready?
Personally, I don't think the infrastructure is really ready for mainstream consumers.
Even though we have a lot of discussions about L2 and L3, working with these chains is still challenging. Whenever I'm using L2 or L3, it's quite difficult to check the status of transactions on their respective chains - for example, on Zora, trading $ENJOY is still very confusing. Logging into the Farcaster client via the "Sign-in with Farcaster" method is still clunky and, frankly, a little annoying. Many people at Farcon are excited about buying items on-chain, but they have to wait more than 10 minutes to complete their purchase because they need to transfer funds to Base.
However, hiding behind the excuse that "we have to wait for the infrastructure to be in place before we can build an application" is dangerous and complacent. When I talk to people at FarCon, I set up a framework for thinking about the evolution of infrastructure and applications in two phases.
Phase 1:
Make it easier for lower-tech, less native-cryptographic, and more product/vision-oriented people (aka "Idea Guys") to use tools and iterate on app concepts that are likely to appeal to mainstream consumers. We've made great strides in this area thanks to the efforts of the Farcaster team, Farcaster-native infrastructure teams like Neynar, general infrastructure teams like Stack and Privy, and other developers in the community. Leverage crypto-native users as a testing ground for these MVPs and continuously improve without critical infrastructure hurdles.
Phase 2: Create best-in-class app and product experiences for consumers with a variety of interests, encryption levels, and backgrounds.
I think the first phase is coming to an end. Over the past few years, we've made impressive progress in infrastructure, from working with companies like Privy to develop embedded wallets, to leveraging L2s/L3s to reduce costs, to working with companies like Decent to improve bridging and chain abstraction, to seamless withdrawal solutions like Ansible, to building the Farcaster protocol itself, which is a huge feat of complex network engineering. We still have a lot of work to do to further improve the user experience, but we can finally do it while developing apps and experimenting quickly.
Future Farcaster clients
During FarCon, there was a lot of discussion and debate about the fate of the client (both IRL and URL, but mostly URLs). Because the Farcaster team may have an incentive to keep Warpcast as a mainstream client – most of the clients will simply serve as functional fodder for Warpcast and be swallowed up soon.
Considering the form factor of the client so far, I think this is a core argument that makes sense – most clients are doing some form of makeover or slicing/cutting of the global Warpcast feed. In my opinion, most of the prospect-side concepts I hear stay within this narrow confines. My sense is that the core desire for this homogenization is to attract and suck off Farcaster's valuable social graph, and less attention is paid to the other essential elements of Farcaster: the Farcaster protocol and its data architecture.
My past conversations with Andrew Hong, research consultant at Archetype, and the team trying to build a social network have taught me that the ability to leverage out-of-the-box p2p networks and data structures that are actually modularly designed for social graphs is a game-changer for app developers. I'd love to see the vision for the client go beyond support for existing Warpcast users and provide completely new experiences or features that may not be possible within the confines of a Twitter-like interface like Warpcast, or appeal to Warpcast's main user base that may not be interested in crypto industry topics. Also, at a high level, the consumer-facing interface tries to do everything, but in reality it doesn't do anything – "no super app, I love you". Channels are an ingenious effort in this direction, as Warpcast channels for specific topics can better provide a more niche, differentiated client for a particular community and allow those clients to appear more naturally.
The above then implies a previous view that the infrastructure/onboarding mechanism has not yet reached a state where it can fully abstract Farcaster/Warpcast from the client experience, which could lead us to a state of "meta-feature" clients.
So, another question that naturally arises – why leverage crypto infrastructure if you want to attract non-Warpcast users? In an age of abundant information and media, both real and analog, social management and coordination are essential. I believe that social products that are fully coordinated by users can be very powerful, and tokens are a powerful mechanism to facilitate this coordination.
One short-term issue that I'm particularly curious about since I left FarCon is the future of commerce on Farcaster and commercial-focused infrastructure/clients. In the field, I know of multiple teams that support different business experiences during the conference. This category has generated builder excitement very quickly, and I hope to follow developments there particularly closely in the coming months.
Dismantle consumer-grade encryption products
All in all, the common question I received at FarCon is what I care most about consumer-facing crypto products right now and how I can look at this space more broadly. Today, I use two different frameworks to divide consumer encryption:
Putting ecosystems first
The crypto ecosystem is notoriously tribalistic (i.e. Ethereum vs. Ethereum). Solana), and the same is true for a narrower consumer ecosystem. It has always been interesting to observe the interaction between Zora, Base, and Farcaster as intertwined ecosystems. Zora and Base-based transactions often rely on Warpcast for distribution and discovery, while Farcaster is supported through Zora and Base, and I believe that the cultures and practices that emerge in these ecosystems, whether independent or interconnected, will be central to shaping the short-term future of consumer-grade crypto money, as builders tend to be most inclined to build in ecosystems with specific user personas.
Use case first
In terms of the product use case/type I'm considering, there are a few categories:
- Connect offline/online user data
- Brand loyalty
- On-chain social
- On-chain media/music
These categories intersect with each other, so I'll provide a more comprehensive reflection below:
In my previous post "Fast Forward: Building Consumer at Internet Speed", I wrote about how user identities and experiences are fragmented between IRLs and URLs. For the sake of brevity, I'll briefly rephrase it here:
- The user's journey online and offline is very fragmented. As the boundaries between the physical and digital planes continue to blur, so does the ability to form a truly recognizable, representative identity. We have a huge opportunity to create experiences that seamlessly blend physical and digital, especially as social graphs can move freely between online and offline
- For individuals/communities: How can my favorite online channels better inform and connect with the people, groups, and places I regularly interact with offline?
- For brands: How can brands better understand how consumers who purchase products in-store spend time online and engage with them on these platforms?
Now is a critical time to think about the intersection of crypto and media, although I also believe that these products will stabilize over a longer timeframe than most short-term opportunities. Traditional media and music are experiencing an existential crisis and are collapsing in terms of business structures, monetization, and the role of consumers and artists/critics. I mentioned a point earlier that I think tokens and crypto more broadly are powerful tools that can be leveraged to orchestrate media networks that are increasingly reliant on user engagement, user-generated content, and maybe even user ownership.
I deliberately kept this reflection relatively primitive, so as not to spread the temptation of overintelligence. Overall, I left FarCon with both excitement and apprehension about its future. There is no doubt that the foundations have been laid for the star team and the early ecosystem that formed organically. I believe that taking the ecosystem to the next level requires a diverse community of developers, creatives, and strong users, and I'm very excited to be a part of their journey."