Last year in May, I wrote an evaluation of my experience using the social media platform Mastodon. Since then, I’ve tried other decentralized Twitter alternatives and eventually came across Farcaster. Over a year has passed since I joined Farcaster, so I’ve decided to share my thoughts on the platform and my experience using it.
First, it’s important to note that Farcaster is somewhat different from Mastodon in that it’s not actually a platform but a social protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain. This allows users to preserve their content and identity on the protocol layer without being restricted to one instance or platform. This also allows them to choose from a variety of different front-end clients. The one I use most often, and the most popular, is Warpcast. There are other clients out there, but I have yet to try them, so for this post, I will mainly focus on the UX of Warpcast.
So, how does it hold up?
The Community
By and large, the community is pretty great. Over the past year, I’ve made meaningful connections with some brilliant builders and thinkers in the web3 space. At the time of writing this, I have accrued 457 users on the platform. Not bad for year one. In my evaluation post for Mastodon, I expressed the desire to be part of a strong community centered around web3. I can confidently say I have found my tribe and feel right at home. I also mentioned that, at the time, most web3/crypto OGs were still using Twitter to communicate with each other. Interestingly enough, as Elon Musk steadily drove users and advertisers away from the platform with his antics and terrible decision-making, most of the smart people in the web3 ecosystem have migrated elsewhere, mainly here on Farcaster or Lens (Lens has recently gone permissionless. I’m seriously considering giving it a try and sharing my thoughts). Whatever is left of the web3 community on Twitter is either bots, crypto shillers, or degens. Oh, how the turn tables.
One main criticism I have of the Farcaster community is that it feels a bit too homogeneous. With Mastodon, I felt like there was more diversity of thought and culture. As much as I love web3, on Farcaster, sometimes it’s all people talk about. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and with the balkanization of social media networks, it’s inevitable that places like Farcaster will have a bit of an echo chamber effect. Still, it would be nice to get new community members who aren’t web3 OGs or Vitalik simps. I do feel this has improved somewhat with the introduction of channels (a feature I will get to in a minute), and you do see a variety of different subjects being discussed. Maybe I just need to adjust the feed for my timeline.
Another aspect that I like, and dislike, about Farcaster is just how nice the community is. Almost too nice. While there are often debates and in-depth discussions about complex topics, I’ve hardly ever seen any real toxicity, unless it’s purely for jest. It’s become a running joke in the community that Farcaster is a lot like a church youth group, and this feels extremely accurate. Everyone here is just so… nice. Heck, even the bots are friendly! The community is so nice in fact that they had to make a channel just so people can be mean to each other.
After the hell hole formerly known as Twitter, I honestly shouldn’t complain. Having a friendly community with genuine, civil discussions is a fresh breath of air. Maybe I’ve just grown so accustomed to a toxic and adversarial internet that I’ve forgotten that a warm and welcoming internet community is actually possible. That’s a sad, yet hopeful, thing to realize.
I should take a moment to briefly mention the bots. In recent months, bot accounts have become fairly common on the protocol. These accounts often pump out repetitive and generic content regularly just to get views and tips. For the most part, the bot accounts don’t bother me, and they’re not especially a nuisance. What does bug me, however, is when I make a cast in hopes of getting genuine community feedback, and all I get are bot replies. There has been some discussion in the community about a potential fix to the bot issue. The main feedback expressed by Dan and other big developers is that there isn’t any real way to regulate the bots short of enforcing censorship on the protocol. Due to the decentralized nature of FC, I generally agree, although it would be helpful to have more bot regulation tools, such as “bot-or-not”, to filter out and reduce the amount of bot spam.
The UX
Overall, the user experience is pretty great, and there’s very little for me to complain about, at least as far as Warpcast goes. The client is designed very similarly to Twitter, so it’s fairly intuitive for someone familiar with social media platforms. There are several features of Warpcast that I particularly enjoy, one of which is the onboarding process. When I first signed up for Mastodon, I remember the lengthy and tedious process of reaching out to a certain instance and getting permission to join that instance. With Warpcast, it was a simple matter of initiating my FID on the chain and saving a recovery phrase, email verification, and then setting up my user profile. It takes no more than a minute to sign up.
Now that the app is permissionless, you are required to pay $5 a year to use it, though I see this as a small price to pay. I usually don’t like paying for apps and software, but for Farcaster I will make an exception. It is not cheap to build and maintain a product on-chain. Also, I am ensured that in return, I still own my data and identity. The original sin of the internet was free content, and it led to the dystopian enshittified internet that we are subjected to now. In the end, the Farcaster community is so engaging and the clients are so well designed that paying $5 a year is well worth the price. Either you pay for and own the product, or you are the product.
Aside from the onboarding process, there have been some fantastic features built on Warpcast in the past year that have greatly enhanced the user experience. One of my favorites, which I mentioned prior, are channels. You can essentially think of channels as subreddits, with each channel designed for a specific topic. There are hundreds of channels to choose from, and casting in a channel boosts the visibility of your casts. Users can also start their own channels, although you are required to make payments for maintenance. I feel like the addition of channels has helped diversify content on Farcaster, and it allows users to easily find certain topics and interests that pertain to them.
Another recent feature that I love are frames. Frames are basically small widgets that perform certain actions which can be embedded within a cast. For example, you could create a photo gallery, polls, payments, NFT listings, mini-games, and more. One user, Cassie Heart, figured out how to get Doom working in a frame! The creativity and flexibility of frames highlights the potential of a decentralized social network like Farcaster. I look forward to seeing more innovative tools like this in the future.
The only frustration I really have with the Warpcast client is the inability to edit casts. I’m not a highly technical person, so I’m unsure if this is a feature or a bug of building atop a blockchain, but it can be rather irritating to cast something and then have to delete and recast it if there’s something I want to change. Honestly, it’s not a big deal breaker for me, but it’s odd to me that a feature so basic has never been implemented on the client.
Conclusion
Overall, my experience with Farcaster has been quite positive, and I will likely continue to be a long-term member. Although its DAU is nowhere near Twitter’s yet and the community is still quite small, this protocol has massive potential, and I look forward to the protocol’s future growth.
I do plan to try out other platforms and protocols, such as Lens, and writing about my user experience. As an aspiring UX designer, I’d like to take opportunities like this to expand my knowledge of good user experience design and guide the direction of my own projects.
For the past couple of years now, due to the lack of good web3 products, I began to believe that web3 simply didn’t exist yet and that there weren’t enough well designed applications of the technology to make it solid. Now, I can honestly say that the next iteration of the internet is finally starting to take shape. In my eyes, Farcaster is the very first legitimate web3 product to have been deployed, and the proper beginning of the decentralized web: great UX, strong network effects, and most importantly, sufficiently decentralized.
Maybe we’re not so early after all…
