4

I now disagree with Dan‘s strategy to grow the protocol by growing its developers by growing its DAU. If you build a system and it is predetermined on being adopted by devs and those devs are attracted by the idea that you‘re just going to stream DAUs to their apps as a service, then you‘re not building a community of people who are enthusiastic about decentralization. Actually, just saying this makes it so obvious. Compare this to Ethereum, a community that has, for years on end, resisted the pressure to centralize to capture more market share. Has it attracted mercantile consumer crypto founders? Obviously it hasn‘t. Has it attracted people who feel an entitlement towards Vitalik and the EF to make number go up? A bit. But it sure does not expect Vitalik to serve the ecosystem by streaming DAUs. So perhaps this is where Dan‘s doctrine, to „just attract more DAUs“ because that‘s what devs tell us they want, is misguided. The enthusiasm about Farcaster is that devs want a pragmatically working decentralized social network. Qualitatively, there‘s no way you can honestly disagree with this. This space would lose its entire purpose without seeking to achieve decentralization. But yes, you can absolutely lie to yourself and say: „no! That‘s not what devs tell us they want!!!“ And you‘d be also correct. But unless they‘re out to grab the money, which isn‘t too hard as a dev anyways, if you‘re willing to give up principles, then you are on a mission. But guess what: Building an app with the expectation that there‘ll be a streaming of DAUs to you, that‘s not a mission. That‘s on one side entitlement, and on the other a promise. But attracting people to the mission of just getting users streamed to your suboptimal consumer app is obviously not attracting the missionary crowd. And so yes, you‘ll hear more of what you‘re selecting for.