Original Title: "Decentralized social media part. 2 - Lens and Farcaster"

Original Author: Albiverse

Original Translation: PANews

Recently, the decentralized social protocol Farcaster no longer requires whitelist permission and anyone can register without an invitation. Developers can also build applications, register users, and read/write Hub data without any third-party involvement. Last year, Farcaster, a social protocol that raised $30 million in funding led by a16z, how does it differ from Lens Protocol? The author compares and analyzes Farcaster and Lens Protocol from three perspectives of the three components of Web3 protocol: the protocol itself, project ecology, and community, interpreting the strengths and weaknesses of both.

Farcaster: Decentralized Social Network Built by Silicon Valley

Farcaster is founded by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan in Silicon Valley. Both of them previously held senior positions at Coinbase.

Protocol Layer: Pragmatic Decentralization

Founder's cultural roots are reflected in the choice of protocol architecture and the practical philosophy of decentralization. Their CTO refers to it as "fully decentralized". He points out that two users in the Farcaster network should always be able to communicate with each other, which means that...

They have their own identity.

They can publish and read online information in an uncensored manner.

Here's how it's done below.

Farcaster architecture is described at https://docs.farcaster.xyz/protocol/architecture.html

At a higher level, user identities are recorded and owned on the chain, while messages and posts are stored in a chain-agnostic network of nodes called Hub. Compared to fully on-chain solutions, this allows for faster and cheaper processing of user data. In many ways, Lens is moving towards a more off-chain approach with its new L3 Momoka.

However, Farcaster currently does not provide new on-chain functionality at the protocol level. Instead, the FC team focuses on creating a more traditional set of social media features for posting, commenting, etc. Therefore, one question is whether this partially off-chain and conservative protocol design will limit developers' creativity and create a good ecosystem.

Perhaps the "shortcoming" can be alleviated by third-party services that have already appeared in the Farcaster ecosystem:

Like Airstack and Neynar, indexers and data providers have bypassed the need for on-chain social graphs in the encryption industry.

A tool like Mint can make up for the shortcomings of tokenization in forum systems.

SDKs like Discove can replace Open Actions, allowing developers to create mini applications directly in Warpcast.

One thing is for sure, there is currently no way to collect posts, transaction data, and other social assets on Farcaster.

When it comes to developer experience, the simplicity of Farcaster is an advantage.

Farcaster Protocol's several important concepts

FC Business Model: Users will pay an annual fee to the center to store their data. This is handled by storage contracts, and the price depends on supply and demand.

FC Governance: Farcaster adopts rough consensus and running code as its governance model. When someone proposes a suggestion, gains support, and releases running code, changes occur.

Client and application: developers unleash their creativity.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the Farcaster community building project.

Project based on Farcaster

Warpcast is the main customer of Farcaster, currently occupying over 90% of the market share. Warpcast was built by the Farcaster team themselves and is the most comprehensive product in the entire FC ecosystem. While building the Farcaster protocol, the FC team also built the Warpcast client, and in the long run, they plan to hand over the maintenance of the protocol to the community.

One advantage is having a high-quality client, which everyone can use as an entry point to the FC community. On the other hand, a major disadvantage is that this may undermine the enthusiasm of other projects in the ecosystem, especially considering Warpcast's huge market share and first-mover advantage. However, Warpcast may still be the protagonist in the Farcaster ecosystem and become a super app, much like Twitter has third-party apps running around it.

This article can be divided into two categories by separating the projects in the FC ecosystem:

Enhance the Warpcast application with the following projects: Eventcaster for creating events, Searchaster and Findcaster for searching posts or people, Launcaster for discovering projects, Discove for embedding small applications in the Warpcast feed, and Weponder for creating surveys on Warpcast and more.

A project loosely integrated with Farcaster that extracts specific types of data: for example, Fabric.xyz displays Farcaster configuration files with check marks on its platform. Unlone publishes live text records as topics on Warpcast. Paragraph has directly integrated FC social graphs and comments into its Web3 platform.

Paragraph recommends subscribing to your FC followers.

https://warpcast.com/ccarella.eth/0x a 4 bd 4 f

First of all, it is difficult to predict what will happen with the financialization of all social media assets (such as personal profiles). Imagine an open market for Twitter/X accounts, where all TikTok posts can be collected and traded. While there may be benign speculation, it can also lead to fraudulent behavior. The author also believes that although monetization increases revenue for creators, financialization is not the original intention for most people to log in to social media.

Lens Project Ecology: Attempting On-Chain Media

From April 10th to October 10th, posting, commenting, and Mirror statistics on Zurf.social

The three largest applications in the Lens ecosystem are clients with social media feeds. According to the chart, Hey.xyz (formerly known as Lenster) is a Twitter-like client created during the Lens hackathon in March 2022 and now dominates the market. Phaver, which recently raised $7 million, is in second place, and Orb, which recently raised $2.3 million, is in third place.

The experience on Hey and Orb is very similar to Twitter/X, except that in addition to being able to set thresholds or collect posts, Phaver allows users to pledge each other's posts in order to manage and receive rewards.

These are the observation results before the launch of Open Actions. Open Actions allows more complex applications to be embedded in the feed. The deployment of Lens V2 may trigger a wave of innovation in the Lens ecosystem.

Airstack's positioning is as a leading Web3 social data and API provider (including Farcaster and Lens).

Lens Community: Still Searching for Benign Growth Sources

Lens daily activity statistics data source: Zurf.social-https://hey.xyz/posts/0x e 222-0x 032 f

Currently, Lens is still in a closed stage, and only over 100,000 people can access the Lens handle.

Lens has encountered some issues in the field of robotics and is actively working to resolve them through the use of AI, closed testing, and other potential means. The decrease in the number of robots on the platform may partially explain the decline in activity over the past few months, but this cannot be fully confirmed.

As far as the author knows, the Lens team has always focused on the development of developers and creators. This is to guide the supply of applications, services, and content.

The content on Lens is mainly created by ordinary users or Web3 creators, which is in stark contrast to the developer-intensive community of Farcasters. Some examples of creators include Jessyfries.lens, ChaoticMonk.lens, Grams.lens, and thefaketomato.lens.

Orb App "Developer Community" (similar to the group function of Twitter community) has 500 people. Although the activity level is only moderate, it may be the best place to get Lens updates and ask questions to other developers.

Overall, the Lens community is still in its early stages and has not yet seen a solid community flywheel.

Summary

Lens and Farcaster are obviously very different in design. Although the author has more theoretical interest in the composability and Web3 provided by the Lens protocol, the author appreciates the achievements of the Warpcast team in building protocols, clients, and communities at the same time. 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.

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