The Latest

Frustrations with Farcaster

One of the biggest conferences of the year wrapped up last week in Singapore, Token2049. I’ve never been but would very much like to check it out in the future. One vibe I heard about secondhand at Token2049 this year was a bit of fear among conference attendees that crypto still isn’t attracting users who aren’t already red-pilled degens. Regular folks aren’t storming the Uniswap castle demanding to trade Doge for Tether. Weird, I know.

I have little sympathy for folks in the industry who may harbor this fear after the week I’ve spent trying to set up a Decential account on Farcaster. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a decentralized social media platform like Twitter where your on-chain presence is owned by you and can be taken to other similar platforms. No central authority can censor it nor de-platform users. Other desoc providers include Lens and Friends.tech, and I like the idea of being in control of the data I create through my social media consumption and participation. What I don’t like is how hard it’s been to jump through all the hoops to create a Farcaster account.

The big picture I can report back here is that I believe it’s the need to outsource a lot of actions from Farcaster that’s a huge roadblock to a more seamless sign-up process. This is the UI, or user interface, you may have heard of, and it leads to the UX, or user experience, of some schmuck like me who wants a decentralized social media presence to promote what we’re doing at Decential.

You can’t spell sux without UX, and it has sucked. The first problem I encountered was needing to buy something called warps (Warpcast is the client running on the Farcaster protocol, and warpy things come up all the time.) The recommended way to buy warps is to connect a Coinbase account to your Warpcast. Okay, no problem, I’ve had a personal Coinbase account for years and we recently created one for Decential Media. I was using my phone for all this, and when I connected to Coinbase it said it didn’t recognize my device. It sent a link to verify my phone, and that then just went into the ether . . .

It took another day and maybe 20 attempts to get Coinbase to eventually complete its verification, a day I remember wondering about – if I was just getting into crypto would I have come back the next day to do all this? The retail dude we all want. Is he going to be this patient? Possibly, but it shouldn’t come to that. The rails between important hubs of the crypto ecosystem still seem like shite to me. The interplay between Warpcast and Coinbase should be seamless. The self-imposed security measures at Coinbase should be seamless. It’s been fifteen years since the Bitcoin white paper and crypto infrastructure is still far too shaky.

So back to those warps, which are needed to set up a channel of your own in Warpcast. The channel is where you start engaging with everyone on the platform. The warps are priced at about $25 for what you need to buy channel access. When I couldn’t connect to Coinbase to buy them I tried using one of my personal MetaMask accounts instead. That worked well but the network fees to buy 2,500 warps was going to be about another $25. (On Coinbase it ended up costing $25.13.) The difference in price is due to transacting on Coinbase’s layer2 versus on the Ethereum mainnet through MetaMask. I don’t know about you, but I don’t run around paying service fees, in essence, of100 percent. Another huge roadblock to adoption.

The next frustration came from wanting to change the username on the Decential Warpcast account. This is done on-chain, and on top of that, I wanted to use the ENS handle I have. To verify my matthewl.eth address, Warpcast needed to connect to MetaMask so I could sign a transaction to prove I own that name. How do you think that went?

I’m by no means a technical person when it comes to Ethereum or other blockchains. I don’t know how to code. But I’ve been around for a while and have had a MetaMask account for years. I bought land in Decentraland and negotiated a structure to be built on that digital plot. I own several NFTs and have gone deep into Etherscan at various points. So I know how to sign a transaction, I’m not setting up a wallet for the first time or sending a test amount of Ether because I’m scared to enter the wrong destination address. It’s just that the folks I’m working with to make these necessary connections need to have their shit together.

MetaMask simply wouldn’t do anything for me on my phone, so I moved to the browser-based version of Warpcast. That helped but again the number of times I had to go through the process of Warpcast connecting me to my MetaMask account was embarrassing.

It feels too late in the crypto game to be running into these broken links. I wish it weren’t the case and while I still don’t feel sympathy for those folks at Token2049 lamenting the lack of normie users – what have they been doing to make this problem disappear?!?! – I do share some of their fear. This is a bad look for crypto and must be fixed before anyone can hope for mass adoption with a straight face. – Matthew Leising, editor in chief, Decential Media

Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your copy of Out of the Ether while you can.