Web 3 Series: Building a Decentralized Social Network with Dan Romero of Farcaster

Village Global Podcast

Dan Romero (@dwr) of Farcaster joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways:
- Dan says that his first love was information. He loved RSS and the goal with Farcaster is to improve RSS enough so that it can compete with Twitter.
- He aims to grow Farcaster large enough so that developers can innovate using their API and data permissionlessly.
- Any developer can build whatever they want on Farcaster — features are not limited to what the core team wants to see built.
- Eugene Wei’s Status as a Service theory is correct in Dan’s opinion.
- They doubled down on the client and having a polished UX at Farcaster. Dan says that the platform is only as good as the number of people using it. The client helps grow the user base.
- Dan believes in first principles thinking when it comes to product decisions. He strongly believes that the average user is not going to spend money to take action on a social network.
- According to Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, all major communication technologies typically start out decentralized and become more centralized over time because centralization has tended to provide a superior consumer experience.
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