Rinse - Bitsocial

New milestone has been achieved: Full P2P node in the browser/mobile is has proven to work and soon to be deployed on plebbit-js. I just got a local browser node to load a comment P2P from the community node over WebSockets. End-to-end encrypted, no gateways or RPC involved!

@TheDRC_ @kelsiemvn Where can I buy its epub?

We are thrilled to announce the release of DRC Fellow @kelsiemvn's new book, "Decentralised Digital Security: Code, Crisis, Community," now available open access and hardcover from Manchester University Press. It's essential reading for understanding blockchain governance, digital security, and the evolving architecture of digital trust. manchesterhive.com/display/978152…

@davidvfurlong Hey, I tried DM'ing you but couldn't get it to work for some reason. DM me please, I'm very interested in trying the demo

@Livid For example, if cloudflare purges your photo then you can just post a new link in the thread. It would be annoying but not fatal in terms of censorship resistance

@Livid I suppose their logic is censorship resistance of text is much more important than images, and also much cheaper to store text as well. We made that same choice and had our protocol be text-only because censorship resistance of images/video is not a high priority imo

all this talk on X about how the decentralized social dream is dead is dumb. Farcaster has never been a good attempt at it to begin with. For starters you needed to download the mobile app and pay $5 to sign up, can't even do that on your PC.

@PhiMarHal holy slop, this is why you should be very careful about financializing social apps

The "fun" in question.

@LefterisJP what do people who sit on governance boards do anyway? $700k is pretty sweet

Oooof. And then you wonder why I stopped dealing with DAO governance? Apart from being a theater, I was spending days doing unpaid research work (not for uniswap) for multiple DAOs. And others get 700k/year to sit on a "governance board"? Fuck that!

@PryvitKyle @zkDragon @VitalikButerin @scupytrooples @ncsgy @tkstanczak helia is great, we have an alternative version of seedit that loads all content in browser p2p, p2p.seedit.app Needs more work on stability, but it's much faster than loading from ipfs gateways!

@zkDragon @VitalikButerin @scupytrooples @ncsgy @tkstanczak I’m still bullish on IPFS adoption via helia.io. We faced a maintenance problem previously and combined with lack of usage because sites weren’t using the tech (.1% of users even encountered a ipfs CID) and so we had to disable for now. Need better site adoption

i’m not about to write off crypto native builders and ecosystems and cede ground to the elite’s middle manager class appropriating our tech for their walled gardens in the name of “mass market adoption” i will not be psyop’d

@kateirwin why can't farcaster compete with bluesky? Farcaster has raised way more money and had a better chance of nailing deso. If anything going full crypto and web3 has turned off web2 people off

Farcaster was never going to be able to compete with Bsky, Threads, and X, so it needs to focus on winning within its niche (crypto app) by doubling down, hence the wallet and miniapp push. I'd like to see them add DeFi too I go on the Zuck app to write a sentence about the weather and it gets 150+ likes within a few hours, while posting anything on Farcaster with a new account is like howling into the void (negative feedback loop). The Zuck app figured out how to blast users' content out at scale to get people hooked. X has done something similar I too am more bullish on Farcaster now that they are committing to crypto more obviously I've said it and I'll keep saying it: The "rich social graph" doesn't mean much when you have to start from zero.... again. It's a big time sink for users to build up a following from 0 on a new social app, and it's risky for creators. Thrds turbocharged its launch by letting people copy their IG over in 2 clicks and then follow all their friends from the other platform with another 1 click, and ppl did this. Social media fatigue is real. If you're not trying to blast out your users' content to set up a positive feedback loop for every user, then do away with likes follows etc and pursue a new model

@riksucks strangely enough even with the centralized design the UX is still terrible. Seems like they combined the worst aspects of both decentralized and centralized systems

kek, found the thread x.com/dwr/status/159…

In mid 2023, I had a small friction with dwr, founder of farcaster. making something "decentralized" works on paper, until it isn't. I mentioned to him that his system is akin to an email server and there's so much censorship even there. His response? if I have read the docs

@PhiMarHal @DefiIgnas Said something similar on x.com/rinse_12/statu…

"X networks effects too hard to break free from." Meh. Farcaster never made a committed attempt at social media. 1) They tried to play kingmaker, to both enshrine some early users they liked and to "bribe" (with autofollowers) midlevel influencers from other platforms. Then the bribes became more overt, with a weekly USDC leaderboard. Net result, instead of developing their own identity they were "web3 LinkedIn". Their biggest voices were uncool, unauthentic, or both. 2) They broke their own algo sometimes in late 2023 / early 2024, and refused to ever walk back. There's catastrophic usability issues with the app. 10s load times on Android are frequent. The feed can not refresh for days. Posting images would disappear into the nether frequently. Logging in forces a phone on you, and requires some mindnumbingly dumb dance with QR codes. Every error is user churn. Altogether, it's churn city. 3) A lot of this comes down to ego from the founder. Dan knows better. Dan knows everything. Everyone who disagrees is an idiot. If you ever voiced your opinion on Farcaster, even without tagging him personally, he somehow found your cast and got upset about it. Someone on Farcaster made a list to crossreference the last tweets someone made at the moment Dan unfollowed them. It speaks for itself. farcaster.xyz/geoffgolberg/0… The failures of Farcaster are mostly the story of how money can break a man. Early Coinbase employee. Enjoying the easiest job in the world at the easiest time, when coins go up 1000x and your audience is captive. You start thinking you're a visionary genius. Everyone else is clearly not thinking as hard as you are. If they were so smart, why aren't they rich? Android is broken? Who cares. I use an iPhone, all the money is on iPhones. The userbase is unhappy? Who cares. It's because they're decentralization maximalists. It's because they're dogmatic. I'm pragmatic. We'll ignore the current userbase, we're aiming for a worldwide audience. Our previous attempt at leapfrogging failed? Who cares. It's because social media is too hard. We tried many different attempts. It's not the quality of our attempts that matters, we did everything right because we tried quantity. It's time to pivot to trading. Our latest trading-oriented hire is a serial rugger? Who cares. He doesn't have privileged access to coins. Him shilling as a company member surely will never do us any wrong. Users should be smart and make their own decisions. 🫥 The weirdest part, there's still a future where Farcaster can win *in spite* of all the bad leadership. There's enormous appetite for a sovereign platform (crypto or not), and the competition is similarly disappointing.

Farcaster is admitting what everyone felt for a while. The decentralized social network never found real PMF. Despite 4.5 years of trying and a few successful adoption spikes. X networks effects too hard to break free from. Instead, Farcaster will focus on being a wallet first, social network second. >user signs up >funds wallet >uses the wallet >finds it useful >while using wallet user finds social features "It’s far easier to add a wallet to a social network than a social network to a wallet." - DWR “come for the tool, stay for the network” It seems the same strategy Base app is built on.

@0xdevelopera also it has 3.5m daily active users as of now which is not bad at all. They've got momentum

@rinse_12 I don't think Bluesky is a success. To me, it's not very different from what Farcaster achieved. They gained critical mass of users to justify existence thanks to Jack Dorsey's name, but that's all.

Ok, hear me out. As someone who was building DeSoc startup back in 2021, before Lens and Farcaster even existed, I think there’s a fundamental misconception here. The issue isn’t that decentralized social networks failed to find PMF. The issue is that after Facebook’s breakout in the early 2000’s, no one has built a major social platform by simply copying others. Every attempt at “Facebook for ” or “Twitter but ” failed. To succeed, you need something new that’s either highly useful or addictive. That’s why LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and OnlyFans won, while countless clones lost. The same rule applies today. Even Google, with unlimited money and talent, couldn’t make Google+ stick. Being a “decentralized, censorship-free” version of something isn’t enough for most users. The average person doesn’t care (they only notice those things after they’ve been silenced or banned, and even then, it matters only to them). Decentralization shouldn’t be the pitch. It should be the infrastructure. Invisible, standard, expected, just like HTTPS. Most users have no idea what HTTPS is, they just benefit from it by default. That’s how it should be with DeSoc. Now, regarding Farcaster, I think pivoting makes sense. They’ve spent years trying to crack the social formula. I joined in 2022/23 and wrote about it a few times here. It never felt like a real social platform, just a group of people using it in hopes of a token airdrop in the future. No genuine engagement or social dynamics, at least in my experience. Will the wallet-first direction work? Hard to say. But trying something new looks like a logical move in my opinion.

@0xdevelopera I actually have both bluesky and farcaster and bluesky is way more usable and has better UX. Also lots of devs are building their own tools on top of it. Lots of labeling services for content too. It's a growing ecosystem. Recommend you check it out

@Crypto_Jargon onboarding celebs wouldn't have fixed and they already got Vitalik shilling them. Their app sucked in terms of UX and it wasn't really decentralized so most people had no reason to move there. It was a good eth echochamber tho

The dream of a decentralized social networking platform comes to an end After trying for 5 years to make Farcaster an decentralized social networking platform they are finally pivoting towords building a decentralized wallet. the product never met the perfect market fit to scale ( in my opinion X will remain the biggest competitor for teams building in this niche). As per the founder (@dwr) from now they will be building with the “come for the tool, stay for the network” strategy: >user comes for a wallet >funds wallet >uses the wallet >the user is also on the protocol But honestly, with $180M funding they could've done it way better, to make a social platform "at-scale" with 1 billion DAU, they could have: - introduce an ad revenue system ( like X) - launch a token and incentivize users and creators - try to onboard celebs There are many things they can do before the backoff with the ton of money they got.

@0xdevelopera I don't think farcaster was a good attempt at deso though, wrote about it here x.com/rinse_12/statu…

Their team made really bizarre choices with their UX and alienated way too many users. Neutrality should be the core of any social media, even moreso for decentralized social media

@ksaitor not getting it, is it location dependent?

a hack to get a free month of ChatGPT Plus go to: Settings > Account > Manage > Cancel Subscription they'll give you a month for free after that month you decide - cancel or keep. but free month is a free month

@NanoGPTcom @kilocode @eshurakov Pretty cool! Any other coding software I can use NanoGPT with?

NanoGPT is now supported in @kilocode! Works great in combination with our subscription - $8 a month gets you 60k coding prompts, and you get a discount on models like Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro and more. Thanks @eshurakov and b3nw for doing the integration, appreciate it!

@PhiMarHal all roads lead back to the casino

@PhiMarHal Farcaster is turning into a trading app, which is I guess what this industry considers a "success".

"At this point, to become successful, you just need to get the correct 5-10 people around Vitalik - or even him - to commit (point in case: Farcaster)." 🤨