# @vgr: Farcaster didn't test if people want decentralization

Source: https://farcaster.xyz/vgr/0x071c16d4
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/vgr-Farcaster-didnt-test-if-people-want-decentralization?index=0x69372db7a9c5baa71ba2e9d86848493f154cec9e383a3235dcab4ff02179d97d46339381
Submitted by @timdaub.eth on 2025-12-08 UTC, 6 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

Vitalik Buterin's critic, @vgr, argues that the claim "most people don't care about decentralization" is unsupported, and that Farcaster did not test whether people want decentralization. He says people adopt decentralized options like private messaging, Mastodon and Bluesky when they are meaningfully available and within their capabilities. He writes that Farcaster instead tested whether a subset of technically sophisticated users would run decentralized infrastructure under some incentive schemes, which he calls a narrow question about one company's business model.

## Article

“Most people don’t care about decentralization” is basically false. I understand the team is coping with sobering results of a long and difficult experiment but please stop with the broad strokes claims about life, the universe, and everything. You have proved nothing even remotely close to such a vast claim.

People flood into private messaging platforms and easily switch platforms or use multiple platforms as a retail-agency level “decentralization.” People use mastodon, a federated approximation of decentralization. They’re trying other experiments on Bluesky. People run home servers and websites. People love bazaars. People consume indie games and art. People go camping with backpacks full of decentralized capacity. 

People want decentralization when it’s actually meaningfully on offer within their capabilities and it makes sense to want. And when they do, they go as deep down the stack as they reasonably can.

All due respect to Dan, this sort of flawed sweeping conclusion is what you get if you pretend “revealed preferences” as an absolute source of ground truths and mistake behavioral economists for philosophers. The “preferences” people “reveal” are a function of what they perceive as being plausible in an environment, given their agency within it. They’re not some opaque Freudian genetic impulses they enact unconsciously that they themselves can’t grok but wise product savants can. They’re primarily a mirror held up by user behaviors to unconscious and conscious product doctrines held by the designers. We learned far more about the Merkle team in the last few years than we did about “humanity” or “crypto people.” The main preferences revealed were those of Dan and Varun.

To be clear, this is not a criticism. They’re fine preferences, and I’m curious to see what they do next. This has been a fine 4 year experiment, but too many of the conclusions being drawn seem wrong/cope/heat-of-the-moment. The Merkle team and non-FC devs have learned a lot of specific things. The rest of us have learned surprisingly little of general value. We certainly haven’t learned that “most people don’t care about decentralization.” 

Farcaster did not ever actually test the proposition that people want decentralization. It tested the proposition that a subset of technically sophisticated users were willing to run decentralized infrastructure under *some* incentive schemes, to secure a “plaza” social space, and make the whole profitable for all. True or false, this is not a particularly broad or interesting proposition about human society at large. It’s a proposition about the business model space of a single company that started with specific technical premises and possibilities in mind.