Original author:Albiverse
Original compilation: Felix, PANews
Recently, registration for the decentralized social protocol Farcaster does not require whitelist permission. Anyone can register and no invitation is required. Developers also dont need any third parties to build applications, register users, and read/write Hub data. last yearFinancingWhat is the difference between Farcaster, a social protocol led by a16z, which raised US$30 million, and Lens Protocol? The author conducts a comparative analysis of Farcaster and Lens Protocol from the three perspectives of the three major components of the Web3 protocol: the protocol itself, the project ecology, and the community, and interprets the advantages and disadvantages of the two.
Farcaster: Decentralized Social Built by Silicon Valley
Farcaster was founded in Silicon Valley by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, both of whom previously held senior positions at Coinbase.
Protocol layer: pragmatic decentralization
The founders’ cultural roots are reflected in protocol architectural choices and a pragmatic philosophy about decentralization, which their CTO calls “fully decentralized.” He states that two users in a Farcaster network should always be able to communicate with each other, meaning
they have their own identity
They can post and read information online without censorship
Lets see how this is done.
The Farcaster architecture is described at https://docs.farcaster.xyz/protocol/architecture.html
At a high level, user identities are recorded and owned on-chain, while messages and posts are stored in an off-chain network of nodes called the Hub, which can be processed faster and store user data cheaper than a fully on-chain solution. . In many ways, Lens is correcting towards a more off-chain approach with its new L3 Momoka.
However, Farcaster currently does not provide new on-chain features at the protocol level. Instead, the FC team focused on creating a more traditional set of social media features for posting, commenting, and more. Therefore, one question is, will this partially off-chain and conservative protocol design limit developers’ creativity and create a good ecological environment?
What may be able to alleviate this shortcoming are the third-party services that have emerged in the Farcaster ecosystem:
Indexers and data providers like Airstack and Neynar bypass the need for on-chain social graphs
Tools like Mint can make up for the lack of tokenization in post systems
SDKs like Discove are alternatives to Open Actions, allowing developers to create mini-apps directly within Warpcast
One thing is for sure, there is currently no way to collect posts, transaction profiles and other social assets on Farcaster.
When it comes to developer experience, Farcasters simplicity is a plus.
Several important concepts in the Farcaster protocol
FC business model: Users will pay an annual fee to the center to store their data. This is handled by the storage contract, and the price is determined by supply and demand.
FC Governance: Farcaster adopts rough consensus and running code as its governance model. Change happens when someone makes a suggestion, gets support, and releases working code.
Clients and Applications: Developers get creative
The following is a non-exhaustive list of Farcaster community-building projects.
Farcaster based projects
Warpcast is Farcasters main customer, currently holding over 90% of the market share. Warpcast is built by the Farcaster team themselves and is the most comprehensive offering in the entire FC ecosystem. The FC team is building the Warpcast client at the same time as the Farcaster protocol, and in the long term they intend to leave the maintenance of the protocol to the community.
One advantage is that there is a high-quality client that everyone can use as an entry point into the FC community. On the other hand, a major drawback is that this could discourage other projects in the ecosystem, especially given Warpcast’s huge market share and first-mover advantage. But Warpcast will likely remain the star of the Farcaster ecosystem and become a super app, a bit like Twitter with third-party apps running around it.
This article can divide the projects in the FC ecosystem into two categories:
Projects to enhance Warpcast applications: Eventcaster for creating events, Searchaster and Findcaster for searching for posts or people, Launcaster for discovering projects, Discove for embedding small applications in the Warpcast feed, Weponder for creating on Warpcast Investigations and more.
Projects loosely integrated with Farcaster to extract specific types of data: e.g.Fabric.xyzShows Farcaster profiles with a check mark on their platform. Unlone publishes live transcripts as topics on Warpcast. Paragraph has integrated the FC social graph and comments directly into its Web3 platform.
Paragraph recommends subscribing to your FC followers
Community Level: Slow but cohesive growth before opening
On October 10, Farcaster opens to the public. This could bring significant changes to community dynamics.
Lens metrics as of October 12, 2023 - https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster
The Farcaster community is very close-knit. The early community was born during the last cryptocurrency crash and is described by the author as a group of smart and optimistic builders. Led by developers and founders, some create content and livestream on unlonely.
Developers hang out frequently and enjoy sharing new experiments with each other. The current app ecosystem reflects this, with social incentives truly rewarding builders who dare to create.
To this day, Dan Romero is Farcaster’s primary source of users, with the second-highest number of user invites. This progressive manual onboarding has two benefits: it slowly solidifies community culture and prevents bots from entering the platform, thereby maintaining cohesion and quality in conversations and content.
Some members are really engaged and it shows in their follower numbers. Most of them have far fewer followers on Twitter. A handful of truly active users account for the majority of conversations on the platform.
https://warpcast.com/ccarella.eth/0x a 4 bd 4 f
What happens when Farcaster opens is a to-be-determined question and should face the same issues as Lens, namely bots and spam.
Lens Protocol, Applications and Community
Lens is built by the Aave team and embodies the Web3 native culture rooted in DeFi.
Protocol: On-Chain and “Asset First”
On the one hand, the original design of the Lens protocol was to record all followers and publications on the chain in the form of NFTs, forming an on-chain social graph. By tokenizing content and profiles, Lens is arguably an “asset-first” social media (created by the Variant Fund team). This allows Lens social media assets such as profiles and content to be traded and combined with other protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem. This is taking advantage of the unique properties of blockchain. For example, users can use some valuable content as collateral for loans to complete new creations.
Creators can make their posts collectible and add collection conditions
Another example of the power of on-chain is the app MadFinance, which allows brands and KOLs to build businesses around sponsored posts, directly on-chain without the need for an intermediary. Brands offer bounties for posts they want to see and put the money in escrow contracts. The creator then creates a post, signs it and submits it to the brand for review. If the brand is satisfied, the post will be automatically published and the creator will be paid.
Given that most activity on Lens is recorded on-chain, it is possible to achieve a clearer and more systematic distribution of value through smart contracts. For example, multiple stakeholders in the social media value chain, such as recommenders, promoters, and creators, may receive partial compensation from NFTs purchased by end users. In Web2, value distribution is often opaque and many stakeholders are not even paid.
In addition to this, the Lens team will soon release Lens V2 with concepts such as Open Actions and ERC-6551 Profile NFTs, which will enhance the composability of Lens. Open Actions allows builders to embed other Web3 applications directly into the Lens clients feed (e.g. hey.xyz). Profile NFT is the most basic and core object in Lens, giving users control over all their content, and may lead to interesting use cases when combined with avatars developed by Sonar, a company acquired by the Lens team to Enhance use cases.
Airstack founder Jason Goldberg praises Open Actions
However, the previously mentioned advantages are partly speculation, and the future of the protocol after the release of Lens V2 remains to be seen. Additionally, “asset first” and a high degree of on-chainization may have some significant drawbacks.
First, it’s difficult to predict what will happen with the financialization of all social media assets, such as one’s own profile. Imagine an open marketplace of Twitter/X accounts where all TikTok posts can be bookmarked and traded. While healthy speculation may occur, it can also lead to bad behavior such as fraud. The author also believes that although monetization increases revenue for creators, financialization is not the original intention of most people logging into social media.
Additionally, Lens has had some scalability issues in the past. This is the price for massive tokenization of all publications on Polygon. The team has been looking to alleviate this problem by moving social activity off-chain from publication origin to a new Optimistic Layer 3 called Momoka. For non-technical people, the question is whether this design can scale to millions of daily active users.
Lens concepts selected by the author. This list is not exhaustive. Lens documentation can be accessed at https://docs.lens.xyz/v2/docs/what-is-lens.
Below is a brief introduction to the Lens protocol governance and revenue model.
Lens governance: Lens is currently being tested in a closed environment, with the core team in control. Testing is slowly opening up, allowing the community to suggest improvements guided by an EIP-like governance model.
Funding and business model: Lens has raised over $17 million in funding from the likes of IDEO and General Catalyst. How the protocol will be maintained in the future is unclear, but it may adopt a fee model, such as Zora and Mirror, to take a cut of a certain fund flow on the platform.
Lens project ecology: try on-chain media
The following is a non-exhaustive overview of the applications and tools built on top of Lens.
Based on the followingZurf.socialUsage statistics of different applications and clients over the past few months.
Statistics on posts, comments and Mirror on Zurf.social from April 10 to October 10
The three largest applications in the Lens ecosystem are clients with social media feeds. According to the chart, Hey.xyz (formerly Lenster), a Twitter-like client created during the Lens hackathon in March 2022, now dominates the market. Phaver, which recently raised $7 million, is in second place, and third is Orb, which recently raised $2.3 million.
The experience on Hey and Orb is very similar to Twitter/X, except that in addition to being able to make posts gated or bookmarkable, Phaver allows users to stake each others posts in order to be curated and earn rewards.
These were observations before the launch of Open Actions, which enables more complex applications to be embedded in feeds. The deployment of Lens V2 may trigger a wave of innovation in the Lens ecosystem.
Airstack is positioned as the leading provider of Web3 social data and APIs (including Farcaster and Lens).
Lens Community: Still looking for healthy sources of growth
Lens daily activity statistics source: Zurf.social-https://hey.xyz/posts/0x e 222-0x 032 f
Today, Lens is still in a closed stage, and only more than 100,000 people can get Lens handles.
Lens has had some issues with its robots that it is actively working to address through the use of AI, closed testing, and other potential means. The decrease in the number of bots on the platform may partly explain the decline in activity over the past few months, but this is not entirely certain.
As far as the author knows, the Lens team has always focused its development on developers and creators. This is to guide the provision of applications and services and content.
Content on Lens tends to be created primarily by regular users or Web3 creators, in contrast to Farcasters dense community of developers. Some examples of creators includeJessyfries.lens、ChaoticMonk.lens、Grams.lens、thefaketomato.lens。
The Orb App Developer Community (a group feature similar to Twitter communities) has 500 people. Its only moderately active, but is probably the best place to get Lens updates and ask other developers.
Overall, the Lens community is still in its early stages and has yet to see a solid community flywheel.
Summarize
The Lens and Farcaster are obviously very different in design. While I have more of a theoretical interest in the composability and Web3 provided by the Lens protocol, I applaud the Warpcast team for what they have accomplished in building the protocol, client, and community simultaneously. Will Lens V2 bring a new wave of innovation to the Lens ecosystem? Will Warpcast continue to rise and dominate the Farcaster ecosystem? Let’s wait and see.
