# What’s next for Farcaster? (Apr 23) With the launch of Hubs now in its final phases, we wanted to recalibrate our priorities as a community. This document is a draft of some goals, problems and a few early solutions and we’re looking for input from casters. ## Goals 1. Increase the number of people creating useful content on Farcaster. 2. Increase the number of developers building on Farcaster. 3. Achieve credible neutrality. 4. Make money to keep funding protocol development. ## Stack-Ranked Problems ### Make sure that Hubs are working as expected Hubs have launched but we haven’t hit our goal of 10 stable hubs and don’t have great reporting. Most apps aren’t reading from hubs and only writing, which means this area is untested and may have bugs or complications that emerge later. - What can we improve to get Discove, Jam and Yup to move over to reading from hubs? - Ship Hubble v1.1 and get 10 external hubble instances running. - Get to permissionless mainnet hubs asap. ### Educating users and developers Figuring out how to do things with [farcaster.xyz](http://farcaster.xyz) is hard — whether its learning about how it works, standing up a hub or getting access to data on a hub. If you search for farcaster you land up on farcaster.xyz which gives you answers to some of these indirectly and after many many clicks, and sometimes not at all. - Build a new landing page that clearly targets the different groups: users who want to try farcaster apps, developers who want to integrate with farcaster content and developers who want to contribute by writing code or running hubs. - Improve the protocol documentation so that it is easy for someone reading it to start developing a hub in another language. - Improve the github documentation so that there are no issues with the examples and other common areas of the codebase. ### Developers do not have the freedom to implement new ideas. The protocol is somewhat restrictive and we’ve discussed why its important to give developers [more degrees of freedom](https://hackmd.io/@farcasterxyz/Hyyt7NFb2) to develop new ideas. - Add flexible types to reactions and casts to enable polls, commenting on nfts etc - Add network separators to allow users and apps to keep content separate across networks. ### App-Driven Signups Applications should be able to get users to sign up to Farcaster without relying on approval or infrastructure from Warpcast. There are a few different ways we can achieve this: - Give applications more freedom to invite users - Farcaster can extend the invite service infrastructure to allow other apps to invite users. - Warpcast can give all application developers a large number of invites to bring on users. - Farcaster can launch the contracts on mainnet and make signups permissionless. - Reduce application reliance on Warpcast - Farcaster can develop a dapp that allows signer management from any arbitrary wallet, which means that users can store identities in metamask and log into Jam, though the experience won’t be as nice as the Warpcast flow. - Farcaster can create a general purpose social wallet desktop app which warpcast and all other apps in the ecosystem can rely on for signers. - Other applications should lean into becoming wallet applications. ### Long-term data storage Applications are already starting to store historical data — warpcast and greg’s indexer are already doing this implicitly. If there isn’t a standard format for how the data is preserved then users may run into trouble when migrating content between servers and realizing that some of it is missing or cannot be translated. - Create an “archive” format for snapshotting older data and backing it up to a file. - Extend hubs to store longer durations of data while the network is still small. - Allow flexible hubs that can choose which users to sync and what duration to hold. ### Make money so that we can fund the ecosystem Farcaster doesn’t have its own funding mechanism and relies largely on contributions from other developers. This will need to change to ensure that the protocol stays independent. - Charge users for the amount of data stored on hubs, either right now or when we get to testnet. The amounts may be minimal (<$1/month) for most users but they will establish the pattern for driving protocol and test the hypothesis that users are willing to pay.
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Farcaster
A sufficiently decentralized social network

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A Turing Complete Social Protocol

Farcaster and Bitcoin are very different networks but share a parochial approach to problem-solving. Bitcoin lets users store and move money without a trusted third party, while Farcaster does the same for text. Describing Farcaster as a decentralized, public, and text-centric social network would be accurate. Many apps have a "twitter-like" feel, with a text feed generated from a set of "follow" relationships. Developers are starting to push the limits of the current design, with apps focussed on image and video sharing, physical presence, and on-chain ownership. People want Farcaster to act more like Ethereum and less like Bitcoin, allowing more degrees of freedom and creativity. Could Farcaster become a "Turing-complete" protocol allowing different social networks to be built? Or is a unique architecture needed for each? Achieving Completeness Farcaster already has essential building blocks like decentralized identity, text storage, and graph relationships. But building diverse networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Whatsapp requires a few more elements: Flexible schemas so that devs can introduce new content and metadata types without a protocol upgrade (e.g., polls) Context separation so that users can keep identities, graphs, and data segregated across networks. Long-term storage so that users don't have to discard older data which is valuable on some networks.

4/28/2023
Account Linking

Problem Using a new app may may require an on-chain transaction. For example, signing up for Farcaster requires making a transaction to the Registry to get an fid. Using your primary wallet to make this transaction may be impractical for a few reasons: Your wallet is on your ledger, at home Your wallet is on your desktop, and you’re on your phone Your wallet is available, but you’re having trouble connecting You don’t trust this app, and would prefer not to have it come close to your wallet Solution The app creates a new wallet, uses a paymaster to cover the transaction costs and can charge you in fiat if necessary. The problem is that you now have a wallet for each new app and remembering the recovery phrases is impractical.

4/25/2023
Farcaster Wallets

Users sign up for Farcaster by registering an fid using an Ethereum wallet. Apps can be authorized to act on the user's behalf by providing them with a signature from this wallet. Apps & Wallets The default line of thinking is that users should use general-purpose wallets to register, and apps can get signatures via WalletConnect. This is convenient for users who have a wallet and for app devs who don't want to deal with the headache of building a wallet. But in practice, the user experience is bad enough to hinder Farcaster’s adoption. In particular: Users without a wallet must set one up first before using Farcaster. Signing messages is confusing and intimidating to the average user. Wallet Connect does not always reliably establish connections.

4/3/2023
A new home for our contracts

Farcaster's identity layer comprises two contracts: a fully decentralized Id Registry and a moderated Name Registry. These contracts are on Goerli but must be deployed to a secure and stable network soon. Which one of the many L1 and L2's is the right home for our contracts? Requirements Farcaster Id Registry issues fids which are unique, numeric identifiers like 12398. It is important that: Registration is very affordable (< $1 in tx fees). Ownership is fully decentralized and cannot be revoked. Ownership is secure against motivated attackers.

3/15/2023
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