What can Purple do for Farcaster Content? (paragraph.xyz) | |
I now disagree with Danâs 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 youâre just going to stream DAUs to their apps as a service, then youâre 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 hasnât. 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 Danâs doctrine, to âjust attract more DAUsâ because thatâs what devs tell us they want, is misguided. The enthusiasm about Farcaster is that devs want a pragmatically working decentralized social network. Qualitatively, thereâs 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: âno! Thatâs not what devs tell us they want!!!â And youâd be also correct. But unless theyâre out to grab the money, which isnât too hard as a dev anyways, if youâre willing to give up principles, then you are on a mission. But guess what: Building an app with the expectation that thereâll be a streaming of DAUs to you, thatâs not a mission. Thatâs 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, youâll hear more of what youâre selecting for. | |