Farcaster is going to be.....different

Farcaster has been one of the more successful decentralised social media project of the last few years. It’s a low bar though. Just being alive is a success in the socialfi corner of the internet.

The debate over just how decentralised Farcaster is or isn’t has been had (yes Nostr and Lens, we hear you up the back, yes you are much more decentralised: well done) so I’m not going to rehash it here. 

Farcaster has been through two ownership changes in the last 6 months. The original team sold to Neymar (a prominent Farcaster developer) and they announced a couple of months ago that they were looking for a buyer. 

Enter The Network State and a pretty dramatic shift in the direction of the product. Users were presented with an ultimatum when they logged into the Farcaster client recently (see the end of the article for the full text)

 

Note the section I’ve highlighted. Calling this ‘Singapore-like’ does a great disservice to Singapore.
A far more accurate description is Kazakhstan-like.

Because The Network State is from Kazakhstan and is backed by an authoritarian-leaning Silicon Valley tech billionaire

https://www.gov.kz/org/maidd/press/news/details/1309072?lang=en 


Kazakhstan is a brutal dictatorship where corruption and censorship are features; not bugs.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/kazakhstan#:~:text=In%20Kazakhstan%2C%20parliamentary%20and%20presidential,or%20owned%20by%20government%2Dfriendly%20businessmen 



And Balaji S. Srinivasan is probably not the guy you want running anything to do with the sharing of information.

From Gemini

Critics generally view his philosophy as a digital form of neo-feudalism or hyper-individualist secessionism designed to shield tech elites from democratic accountability, while supporters see it as a blueprint for peaceful, voluntary governance and technological freedom.

I lean heavily towards the former, not the latter. Nearly all freedom-destroying govts come into power with the promise of making things better by only allowing “good” behaviour and not “bad” behaviour. It is the classic set up for most (if not all) dystopian works of fiction. 



I know where this is going. We all do. So OF COURSE I voted to stay.
As of time of writing my account isn’t blocked or muted. 
Based on the views I’ve expressed on Farcaster I expect that won’t last, but we will see.

What does this mean for socialfi?

Farcaster wasn’t a world beater by any means, so the immediate impact will be minimal. 
Maybe they will enact some style of X Creator scheme which will result in a lesser version of the disaster that proved for X, mostly because they will have banned all of the spam2earn accounts who caused that disaster. Though poor people usually find a way to get to free money, so I expect Farcaster to be locked in an endless battle with the online global south whilst the app deteriorates over time.   

It does highlight what a different offering much more decentralised social media is and that may help boost promising projects like Lens (https://lens.xyz/)  and Nostr (https://nostr.org/). 

I get the feeling that the winner will be Lens. Nostr is arguably the better decentralisation tech but it has neither of these features Lens has:

• crypto is a great way to integrate payments, which all viable social products need in some shape or form (even if they won’t admit it) 
• Lens has a central organisation who is helping promote and manage distribution 

The full text of the user agreement

Farcaster is becoming the Network State Protocol
Network School has acquired Farcaster. Our goal is to build a network of opt-in digital societies which ultimately gets printed out in the physical world. Towards that end, the Farcaster protocol will stay open to everyone, but the app you're using now will be moderated to create a positive-sum community for techno-optimists.

If you want to stay and build that community with us, please click the "Vote to stay" button below. You'll get an onchain NFT stating that you're voting for the Network School Farcaster core team to set the rules of this app. We call this the social smart contract. It's like a new terms of service, which you freely opt into, and which we think is very reasonable.

Briefly, the social smart contract institutes a Singapore-like standard for public interactions in this app, to intentionally provide an alternative to the default hostility and rudeness of today's social media. We no longer allow users to start fights or to attack others on the basis of their race, class, sex, nationality, religion, or other protected characteristics. The new social smart contract also bans spam, malware, bots, NSFW, and undisclosed AI content. And the client will become a human-only social network, where we'll gradually require proof-of-human for every account, while permitting pseudonymous accounts to maintain good reputations via zero-knowledge proofs of their humanity.

Again, every change we're making is towards turning the Farcaster client into a moderated community for techno-optimists that want to build startup societies in the physical world.

If that sounds great to you, click the Vote to stay button below, and you'll get an NFT in your account recording your vote for Network School Farcaster and the new social smart contract.

Conversely, if you don't want to build a techno-optimist community, or don't like the idea of Singapore, or don't know yet what you want to do, click the Vote to leave or Not now buttons. Your account will become read-only within this client, but nothing is deleted. You'll keep your keys, wallet, and funds, and you can log into another client, or fork the open-source client to build your own. And you can change your vote at any time on the Your Vote tab of the side panel.

Now let's go into a bit more detail on the social smart contract, how we're implementing it, and why we're doing it.

1. The Social Smart Contract and the Network Code
The Code of Hammurabi was one of the first written legal codes, and its purpose was to provide a degree of predictability to the world. Similarly, our social smart contract implements a "Network Code" that governs this reference client. It's a set of written digital rules, basically AI prompts, whose purpose is to bring a degree of predictability to the digital world. An open weights AI model applies the Network Code to every post and account, such that anyone should be able to re-run these rules on the same public data to get the same results. The goal is uniform rule-of-code, such that we judge conduct instead of identity.

And what exactly is the Network Code? It specifies digital felonies, misdemeanors, and infractions.

Digital felonies that result in bans include hate speech (attacking others on their race, religion, gender, sexuality, class or nationality), death threats or wishing serious harm on a person (e.g. wishing cancer on someone), scams (e.g. phishing, wallet draining, fake airdrops, guaranteed returns), or various forms of unacceptable behavior (like repeatedly starting fights, repeatedly stalking accounts after they've blocked or muted you, or repeatedly passing off AI writing as your own). Digital misdemeanors that result in suspensions include starting or feeding fights with others, and flooding feeds with low-quality posts. Digital infractions that result in warnings include spreading clear hoaxes as facts, or hyping token prices repeatedly. We eventually want to build AI models into the client to allow client-side warnings of Network Code violations prior to posting, but for now you can use your judgement to avoid digital felonies, misdemeanors, and infractions.

The Network Code also rewards good behavior. Teaching others something, sharing something you built with details, or helping others with what they asked are all rewarded. So is original insight, reasoned behavior, giving specific credit to others, disagreeing civilly, calming others down, and correcting the record with evidence, including your own mistakes. The idea is that open weight AI models can finally incentivize pro-social behavior on social media.

Of course, the core team can't anticipate everything in advance, so there will be some manual judgment calls. Still, we think the idea of the Network Code starts moving the world towards a predictable rule-of-code that mirrors the offline concept of rule-of-law. Again, voting to stay means voting for the Network School Farcaster core team to update the Network Code, with the goal of building a friendly, techno-optimist community online.

2. From the Soviet Union and Somalia to the Singapores of Social Media
Ok, that was the how. Now let's give a bit more detail on why we're moderating this reference client, while also allowing you to create or join your own open-source client.

Over the last few decades, social media has had two primary settings: (a) the Soviet Union (where users were censored without their consent) or (b) Somalia (where any form of hatred, including de facto incitement to violence, can be posted without much consequence). We don't think either of these models works in the long run.

Instead, we want a third setting: opt in to constraints. Each client writes its rules down, and each user who wants to join that client reads them, signs them, and abides by them. The rules (of which the Network Code is the first) are applied via open weight AI models uniformly to all users, and moderate speech within pre-agreed bounds. Some users will choose to leave a given client, or be offboarded for violating the rules; if so, they retain their digital assets and can apply to join a client with different rules.

We call this decentralized democracy: you vote with your crypto wallet, your digital ballot, and your virtual feet — by joining a client, by leaving a client, or by building your own. Everything is based on manifest, provable consent. You consent to joining a client community, and the client community consents to accepting you as a member.

In short, the idea of decentralized democracy is to recognize that (a) one set of rules won't fit everyone (so the Soviet Union isn't a model) and that (b) the idea of no rules for anyone isn't great either (so Somalia is out too), so instead we want (c) many Singapores of social media. And if all goes well, this reference client is the first such social Singapore.

3. An Informed Vote
Now you understand what we're doing. We're turning Farcaster into a positive-sum, techno-optimist community which ultimately seeks to print itself out into the physical world, starting with meetups and popups, and graduating toward startup cities and network states. The first step towards that goal is to institute a Singapore-like standard for pro-social online behavior within this app, as implemented via a set of digital rules we call the Network Code.

We think this will radically improve the app over traditional social media because (a) the goal of printing out into the physical world provides a collective purpose and (b) the social smart contract provides a legitimate, democratically-determined, publicly consented-to set of behavioral standards. It sets the foundation for everything else we want to do, including our digital economy, and any possible digital asset, because it means we actually have a community of shared values.

So: if you want to embark on this experiment in decentralized democracy with us, please click Vote to stay. Otherwise, go ahead and click Vote to leave or Not now, and you can find another client that suits you or even create your own.

Vote to stay

You sign the Social Smart Contract with your key. Your vote is stored as a signed record.
You keep posting here, under the contract's rules.
The rules apply to your past posts as well as new ones. Each account gets a standing: green, yellow or red.
Serious or repeated violations lead to offboarding.
Vote to leave

Your account becomes read-only in this client.
Nothing is deleted.
You can export your keys and take your followers to the open-source client or any other Farcaster client.
You can change your vote later on the Your Vote tab of the side panel.
Not now

You can keep reading and decide later.
Whatever you choose

Your keys, wallet and funds stay yours.
Your followers and your history stay on the protocol.
You can export everything.