Farcaster is an open protocol for social networking. Warpcast is a client built on top of the protocol.

There is only one Farcaster protocol. There can be many clients built on top of the protocol.

The classic analogy is email:

Why does this matter?

Decentralization is at the heart of crypto and Farcaster is no different. Centralized social platforms (called “corporate networks” by Chris Dixon) completely control everything associated with “you” account on web2 social.

This means:

  1. the owners of these networks can bar you from the platform, change the way you interact with your followers/audience, shadow ban you or demonetize your content.
  2. A large majority of the value created by content creation and interaction is extracted by these owners. This can occur because you don’t own your network on centralized platforms.

If you’ve arrived from Twitter, TikTok or Instagram you will have experienced this when joining Farcaster. You weren’t able to bring your followers here. You had to “start over”, because you didn’t own your relationships with your followers; the company that owned the network did.

Farcaster is different because your relationship with your followers is embed in the protocol. This means that if you dislike the way the way that Warpcast is running things, you can simply start using another Farcaster client and retain all of the followers that you acquired while using Warpcast.

You never have to “start over” again.

Because this lowers the cost to users of changing clients (low switching cost), this means that clients are much more competitive. If Warpcast is extracting too much value from users, another client can compete by extracting less. This doesn’t occur with centralized social platforms because the network effect is strong and switching cost is high. With less value extraction by clients (because they don’t own the network and don’t have leverage) there is more opportunity for value to flow to content creators and users.