I feel like the best way to compete with Warpcast on the Farcaster protocol is to build something that is very different from any WC feature and serves a niche. But one also has to remember that it should be something WC will never want to copy. Because if someone just builds a thing that WC can also integrate, and it shows that this thing is also useful for WC; then WC will just integrate it. So yeah, it has to be a feature that they don't yet have and that they cannot trivially copy.
Thanks for your comment Tim! I can see both sides of this. On one hand, building something WC won't copy gives you a unique advantage in many ways. But on the other hand, what if there were three or five other Warpcast competitors with significant funding? I think if anything that would make Warpcast want to ship even more and better quality -- and whether that results in Warpcast or another client becoming popular that can be a net positive for protocol growth if done right.
> what if there were three or five other Warpcast competitors with significant funding? I don't disagree here, but I also think this will never happen. The Farcaster protocol, at this point, is fundamentally controlled by the Merkle team, and so I'd assume that anyone who wanted to start seriously competing with them would run into the issues of getting funding. E.g., are the protocol economics already so de-risked that it would inspire an investor to dump $1M into a client? What if it turns out that WC can pull a trick and e.g. do permissioned peering after all. Ofc, Dan wants us to know that the p2p economics and game theory will work. But in my view, considering how continuously undermined Ethereum gets, this is far from clear. But competition would definitely improve the WC experience further, I agree!
alternate clients with good number of users is also essential for decentralization. If the majority use warpcast, and it decides to block someone, it's not consolation enough to say "oh but you can still post to the underlying protocol, sure no one can see it butt..." one would hope that people would switch to other clients if warpcast starts censoring regularly, but habits are hard to break...would people have migrated to threads in 2020? i doubt (shouldn't have been too difficult to migrate the network graph)
Agree with Tim on being as different as possible with Warpcast or dead. And the best way to do this is not even position as a Social Client.. eg. Social DEX, Only for live stream for gamers etc.. Otherwise, the only sensible way to be a backable biz is to become an aggregator, unless Farcaster become meta size, then it may make sense.
Dan explicitly talked about how it is really HARD to build a backable biz at all for Farcaster Client. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4550&v=-Ki_UxauIP0&feature=youtu.be&themeRefresh=1&ab_channel=MomentofZen So this only left with 2 viable route: 1. totally different value prop (eg. streaming(unlonely), dex(degencast), content publishing(paragraph)) and farcaster is more of an integration rather than full client 2. full client, but OSS. built more as a public good project rather than backable biz