Farcaster is "sufficiently decentralized"？
Just one question can illustrate whether Farcaster is decentralized enough: if Warpcast is gone, will Farcaster still exist?
At the current time point, the answer is obvious: if Warpcast is gone, Farcaster obviously will not exist either. Of course, this is still in the early stages, and we need a leader to lead everyone in the construction. But we don’t want to see the leader become a dragon and swallow up the success of the construction alone.
You're free to define what "sufficiently decentralized" means to you, of course, but how we think about it is laid out in Varun's blog post:
A social network achieves sufficient decentralization if two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it. This implies that users can always reach their audience, which can only be true if developers can build many clients on the network. If only one client existed, it could stop users from communicating. Achieving this only requires three decentralized features: the ability to claim a unique username, post messages under that name, and read messages from any valid name.
If this is the goal of the Farcaster team, then it is obviously not achieved. If Farcaster feels that it has been achieved, then it only needs to add Follow/UnFollow to the protocol and Cast (message) to the protocol.
Why do people come to Farcaster? For the community, for those who share common interests, and for building Farcaster together.
Although Channel’s original design purpose might have been different, it has now become the de facto community hub. While it currently lacks certain community features, we can remain optimistic—Channel is still in development, and there is hope for more to come.
However, the topic of decentralizing Channel was briefly mentioned and never followed up on. Warpcast offered a compromise by opening the Follow/Unfollow API, but control of the Channel remains firmly in Warpcast’s hands. Farcaster lacks the most basic form of decentralization. Messaging can be an independent feature, and direct messages (DC) can be exclusive to Warpcast, but the Channel, as a fundamental feature, is still monopolized by Warpcast, which is frustrating.
I have already paid for my account, yet it is not supported by Warpcast.Even decentralized registration is not supported by Warpcast. Why is email registration a must-have for Warpcast? Of course, this could be a client-side decision, and I remain neutral on that point. But doesn’t this also suggest that Warpcast is leaning towards monopoly rather than open building? As Farcaster’s lead platform, Warpcast seems to be fortifying its position, resisting contributions from other developers, and even blocking people from creating Farcaster accounts through other means.
What’s more concerning is the slow—almost stagnant—progress of the Farcaster protocol. As a Farcaster developer, I haven’t seen any meaningful advancement in the protocol over the past few months.
Recently, many Farcaster developers have become frustrated. Why? Because they came with the intention of building a decentralized platform, only to find that despite all efforts, Warpcast continues to maintain its monopoly.
As a Farcaster developer, what I see is Warpcast adding more features for itself, rather than focusing on enriching the Farcaster protocol.
I am still optimistic about the future of Farcaster.