# @timdaub.eth: Farcaster needs a grassroots client fork to prove the protocol

Source: https://farcaster.xyz/timdaub.eth/0x1d3c5ac9

## Summary

Tim Daub argues that Farcaster needs a grassroots client fork to prove the protocol's value, and that the current revolt against the leading app's founder reflects class struggle more than a technical dispute. He says Farcaster's founders showed genuine altruism when they created the protocol, and that during the ZIRP era, people with modest wealth could have exited by building a new client. He adds that today's workers feel too demoralized to organize a fork, and that the team has contributed to this by suggesting that growing daily active users is extremely hard. He concludes that a grassroots leader could mobilize developers and users to build a client that draws disenfranchised users away from the main app.

## Article

At the end, the revolt against the social media leader is somewhat of a political phenomenon. It‘s the poors against the multi millionaire. I see it more as a projection of the IRL world‘s class struggle into the cozy web.

When FC was created, I think there was some genuine altruism in D and V inventing and building up Farcaster as a protocol.

And in the ZIRP era there was so much wealth in the plebe class that „just build a new client“ would have allowed groups of disenfranchised plebs to exit. Just years ago there was power, agency and optimism in the FOSS community.

But we are now in a new regime. And those who work for merely an income are so poor and demoralized that forming an organization to fork off feels politically impossible.

I think this is also a Farcaster team communication failure. For years people have been made believe that it is among the hardest things on the planet to get DAU, to build a popular consumer app. Dan himself is intellectually honest about it, because he feels it is an important virtue to practice. And nothing wrong with that.

But this protocol would really reach a new level if a protocol rebellion launched where optimists actually built a client that lived off of the disenfranchisement on the Farcaster app.

I don‘t think commercially producing more clients can be the goal here. Zapper and Base are not a rebells home because the rebel seeks self expression for building a home.

A leader has to be found who mobilizes from grass roots. Not only devs must be found, and other contributors, plenty of missionary DAUs must be available to gift their attention to the forked app, in response to actually voting with their feet and signaling to Dan credibly that they believe in the FC protocol, but not in his app leadership.

If this happened, everyone on here would win. I trust that people could start to believe in this if they wanted.

## Comments

**thatalexpalmer.eth**: tim you didn’t post it here so i thought I should