farcaster

Farcaster is an attempt at a decentralized social protocol which is tied into the Ethereum Blockchain. Users use their Ethereum wallets to generate delegate account keys to then use on Farcaster clients. Farcaster requires a global consensus to operate meaning all hubs (servers that store posts and events) must remain in consensus to operate within the network. This consensus is maintained through gossip between hubs where Merkle tree proofs are used to ensure identical state between hubs. This creates a potential vulnerability where hubs located in oppressive jurisdictions can be pressured by the state to remove certain content it finds objectionable, thus pushing them out of consensus and essentially forking the network. Additionally, requiring a full copy of all events on the network will make running a hub quite costly at scale thus pushing toward centralization. Another important thing to note is that while Farcaster claims to be a “Sufficiently Decentralized” permissionless social network, in order to sign up you must make a payment to a smart contract that goes to a centralized organization. The payment amount is currently $3 USD, but this is subject to change and has changed multiple times in the protocols history. Additionally, at the time of writing this there are no Open Source Farcaster clients and the vast majority of users are on the same client, Warpcast which was created by the founder of the protocol.

EDIT: test