One article to learn about Farcaster, the decentralized social network promoted by Vitalik

Author: defioasis

Last week, Vitalik Buterin's Twitter account was hacked and used to post phishing links, causing users to lose more than $690,000. After research, Slowmist Cosine pointed out that the phishing organization behind the Vitalik Twitter theft incident is still related to the popular and crazy PinkDrainer. The hacking method may be SIM hijacking or other possibilities. Two days later, Vitalik stated on the decentralized social media Farcaster that his Twitter account was indeed subject to a SIM card hijacking attack. The reason may be that his mobile phone number was exposed when registering for Twitter Blue. He had seen before that you should not use your mobile phone number for authentication. suggestions, but unfortunately I didn’t realize it. Vitalik said he has uninstalled Twitter and joined Farcaster, which can control account recovery through Ethereum addresses.

Farcaster is a decentralized protocol for building social applications. Farcaster can be used through front-ends such as Opencast and Warpcast. Farcaster received US$30 million in investment led by a16z in 2022. This article will briefly analyze this decentralized social protocol that is favored by Vitalik and a16z.

Core Issues in Social Networks

Social network activities can be simply understood as a group of users interacting, such as sending information (text, images, audio, etc.) to objects, liking, commenting, forwarding, etc. for each other's posts. In a centralized social network, this group of users can only interact within a specific social application, while in a decentralized social network, this group of users from different applications will be allowed to interact across applications. interact.

There will also be challenges, which Farcaster categorizes as four core issues for decentralized social networks: identity, authentication, availability and consistency. Identity, that is, username, allows users to switch between different social applications and act as a user identity; authentication, when users receive letters from others, they must ensure that they are recognized and trusted sources; availability, user data is stored in different applications Everything is always available; consistency, social network rules, all front-end applications need to support and enforce these rules at all times.

Farcaster’s solution

Farcaster social network covers three layers: identity layer, data layer and application layer. The identity layer is based on Ethereum to determine the operations and authorization methods that can be performed on the network. Identity and authentication are the core; the data layer stores the information authorized by the identity layer and makes it available; the application layer consumes the information stored in the data layer.

(1) Identity: Farcaster ID (FID)

Farcaster introduces username and Farcaster ID (FID) for user social identity, where FID is a unique and non-tamperable identifier introduced by Farcaster to mark the user's identity. The FID identifier is a string of numbers that is bound to the user's main address. Although it is decentralized, it is not appropriate to use a numerical identifier to represent the user. Therefore, the user can choose to register a Farcaster name, which is the user name, and associate it with the FID. Binding. Farcaster's usernames are managed in a special place called a namespace. Usernames may be withdrawn, but FIDs will not.

Username and Farcaster ID will be reflected in two different contracts on Ethereum, the name registry and the FID registry, both of which form the basis of Farcaster user identity.

It is worth mentioning that user identity recovery benefits from FID. Users can set an other address in advance as a certificate to restore their Farcaster identity. This other address can be another wallet address of the user, the address of other known Farcaster users, or even a third-party custodian.

(2) Certification

Message authentication benefits from Farcaster ID. When a user receives a message, he or she can confirm the true source of the message by looking at the sender's FID, finding the corresponding public key (address) on the Ethereum chain, and then checking whether the signature sender was generated by that address. .

In order to protect the user's private key on the device (the private key needs to be loaded into the device application to generate a signature), Farcaster introduces the concept of Signers. The signer is an Ed25519 key generated off-chain. The user registers the signer by making a transaction to KeyRegistry using the signer's public key. The private key can then be used to sign and publish messages to the network.

(3)Availability: Storage Rental

In a centralized social application, users store information on servers similar to RSS and obtain all data on the network by indexing all of these servers. Farcaster introduces hubs for storing data. When different users interact socially, they will download copies of each other's information and store them.

But in order to prevent spam from flooding hubs, Farcaster charges users rent for storing data on the network, which is also Farcaster's main source of revenue. Users rent storage space by paying an annual fee to Farcaster, which inhibits spam and encourages users to clear data of lower value. Storage is managed and tracked on-chain by the StorageRegistry contract.

(4)Consistency

Farcaster is not a direct social application, but a lower-level social protocol, similar to the relationship between Lens Protocol and Lenster. The applications currently built on Farcaster mainly include Alphacaster, a Web3 social application supported by DAO, creating and sharing Discove, on-chain group and personalized subscription Jam, open source Twitter-style front-ends Opencast and Warpcast, and cross-posting to Twitter and Lens Social aggregator Yup. The Farcaster front-end used by Vitalik is Warpcast. The usage logic of Warpcast is basically the same as the core logic of Twitter. You can view the wide-area posts of the "world group", and you can also leave comments, forward and likes on the posts (threads) of the users you follow.

Applications built on Farcaster provide consumption scenarios for data stored on hubs. The application server communicates with the hub, downloads all information, organizes and classifies the information to create applications for different user experiences, and then provides APIs for moving data from different clients. User use.

Applications built on Farcaster need to follow Farcaster's rough consensus and run code, which serves as Farcaster's governance model. When someone puts forward a FIP proposal (Fracaster Improvement Proposal), gets approval from protocol developers, application developers and users, and releases the code, changes to Farcaster will follow. Different subjects reach consensus by agreeing or rejecting. Farcaster will not have a binding voting process, and there will be no official role for veto power.

Social Ecosystem Partners

Link to other applications or communities through the Farcaster identity account, including user reminder Alertcaster, Move-to-Earn Blobs, on-chain social activity preview Eventcaster, Farcaster ecosystem indicator tracking Farcaster Network, completing tasks to earn points FarQuest, messaging application Frens, and Ethereum Explore Interface on the chain, decentralized hacker news Kiwi News, find the latest Web3 project Launchcaster, personalized media source Neynar, publishing and communication Paragraph, find interesting topics Pincaster, DAO tool Purple DAO created by Nouns Builder, search engine Search via Raycast, search using API/GUI Searchcaster, Farcaster community content exploration Surveycaster, tipping Tipcast and Token-driven live streaming Unlonely.

Currently, Farcaster is still in the beta stage, and users can first submit a waiting list to wait. Farcaster and Lens Protocol both serve as the underlying protocols for building social networks, but compared with Lens Protocol, Farcaster is further away from the user spotlight and focuses on developers and application creation. Official data as of mid-September before and after Vitalik announced the use of Farcaster, the total number of Farcaster users was just over 20,000, with more than 3.8 million historical messages on hubs, and after migrating to Optimism, it began to filter spam to target more users. open. Although there is no news about Farcaster's airdrop plan, Farcaster has made the FIP governance module an important part of the protocol, which is still worthy of user experience and interaction.