Protocol

We’re planning to keep the protocol invite-based for the first 1 million accounts. Currently, this is “DM dwr on Twitter”, but the plan is to move to community-driven invites soon. We’ll likely start with a small number of active users to test the community-driven approach and expand from there. If we feel like quality is declining, we’ll adjust.

Additionally, we’d like to keep growth consistent but not overwhelming — ideal is +5% DAUs every week. (This gets harder with compounding!). This should also allow us to incrementally adjust our strategies for maintaining quality without suddenly being overwhelmed by a spike in sign ups.

Initial client

The deliberate growth strategy will allow us to iteratively adjust the defaults for the initial client: what shows up in your feed, who to follow, etc. We’d like to make product improvements that emphasize actual conversations which we believe is the behavior that will most benefit the Farcaster protocol. We also plan to nerf engagement farming.

Client diversity

After Farcaster v2 is shipped on mainnet, our focus for the protocol will be to make it straightforward for other developers to build new clients. Think open source libraries and UI components, as well as tutorials (imagine a Farcaster version of the famous DHH build a blog engine with Ruby on Rails in 10 minutes).

By making it easier to build a new client, developers will be able to permissionlessly experiment with different algorithms, novel UI/UX mechanics, content types and subgroups of users. Here are a few examples of what a developer might do to maintain (or improve!) quality:

  1. A client with an algorithm that’s just focused on URLs being shared, with a special emphasis on URLs from blogs or other indie / niche websites.
  2. A client focused on Q&A or AMAs
  3. A client focused on UX for displaying visual content like images or NFTs
  4. A client that is only accessible to users with certain on-chain characteristics like sent an Ethereum transaction before 2018 or was in the first 10,000 users on Farcaster

See also Deliberate growth