#34: A Change In The Paradigm Of Social Media 🖼️
💸 $50 Billion 1-Click Formerly-Patented Technology Added To Farcaster 🤯
ReFraming Web3 Social Media
I can hardly believe it 🤯
The biggest change to the paradigm of social media I've ever seen is here and I’m excited to get into it.
Over the past three entries, I have been writing about the failures of social media as we currently know it in web2:
Walled gardens, limited ability to share links to outside content, no way to track posts and friends across platform, algorithmically run feeds destroying our attention... the list goes on.
Over the last 6 years, I have been researching how to build a better system that enables users to control their data in an authentic way, tied to a single digital identity, rather than participating in the walled gardens of current web2 media.
It feels wildly fortuitous (fortunate) that, at the same time I was ramping up my discussion of how social media can be made better with web3, I discovered Farcaster.xyz.
In my opinion, the upgrade to Farcaster this week is the biggest change to social media since the introduction of video.
I don't say that lightly.
For the first time in a very long time (possibly ever), I am genuinely excited about the prospects of building the creator economy on social media.
Farcaster introduces three major elements that make it different from anything we've ever seen before.
One of these elements is the ability to, in-app, make a one-click purchase online, directly from the original website itself, through a frame.
This feature was originally patented by Amazon, the "1-click" patent, and helped Amazon become the behemoth it is today.
It's estimated that this patent brought in $2.4 billion a year (for ~20 years). Almost $50 billion for one patent alone 🤯
Now, this feature has been enabled on social media itself.
And this is only one of the exciting elements of Farcaster 👀
Recalibrating Recap
Welcome to Recalibrating! My name is Callum (@_wanderloots)
Join me each week as I learn to better life in every way possible, reflecting and recalibrating along the way to keep from getting too lost.
Thanks for sharing the journey with me ✨
Last week, we touched on the issues with algorithmic control of the Internet as part of web2 (the current level of the Internet). I explained why this algorithmic censorship is going to become a far greater issue as we move into the era of spatial computing, now that Apple has released the Vision Pro.
If you are confused at the concept of web3 (which I know is a lot to take in) please revisit last week's entry for a list of resources and commentary on how it works.
In the week before, I explained the importance of digital identity in an increasingly online world. This post was tied to a YouTube Video that goes through the concept of intangible value and why it has been dramatically increasing over the last 30 years (i.e., the Internet).
This week, I am extremely excited to discuss a new development to the world of social media. I recognize that understanding this new system requires a mindset shift, so I am going to try and make it as simple as possible to understand.
If you have any questions at all, or are confused in the slightest PLEASE email me, comment below, cast at me (you’ll see 👀 )or DM me with your concerns so I can recalibrate my explanations for you and others 🫡
Let's dive in ✨
The Bigger Picture (Why you should care)
The algorithmic Internet powering social media as we know it is broken. The mega corporations have created walled gardens that serve their own interests, not yours.
These platforms mine your attention, sapping it and reducing your own ability to control your attention.
Thankfully, there has been a fundamental change of social networks.
For the first time, I am excited at social media, thanks to farcaster.xyz.
There are three reasons why I am so excited:
cross-platform identity (you can take your posts and your followers/following with you to ANY other web3 social media)
1-click engagement with outbound links (e.g., subscribe to newsletter, buy a print, mint an NFT)
community building by sorting content with channels instead of hashtags (like Reddit, one of the most popular and frequently used platforms).
To help you appreciate why you should care about these three elements of social media, I'll first explain why these are problems to begin with.
Then, I'll go into what Farcaster is and how it solves these problems ✨ I'll also include a referral link at the end that helps you get started if you're interested in exploring the future of social media 😊
Problem 1: Fractured Online Identity
Elaborating on the conversation of digital identity over the last few weeks, traditional social media forces us to break our identity into a different username/password for each platform.
We can try our best to link these identities to build a consistent personal brand by using the same username, but there isn't an actual connection between the identities.
E.g., my username is wanderloots on most platforms to help build the brand of wanderloots. But that still requires you to go to each social media platform, search for wanderloots, and click follow.
It's repetitive, tedious, and completely unnecessary.
The only reason that we must do this is because each social media platform has erected a wall around their data. No data can come in or go out without that particular platform saying so. A walled garden.
Access to this data is controlled by an API (application programming interface), which almost always comes at a cost.
This API prevents you from taking your data (i.e., posts, followers, following) and sharing it with other platforms.
Instead, we are forced to post the same things across each platform to connect with our audience, fractured across the entire social media landscape.
This repetitive posting burns creators out while boosting the algorithms of each independent social media company trying to extract as much attention (via ad revenue) from its users as possible.
What we need is a way to remove centralized control of our own data so that we can have a single identity that can post to any platform. A decentralized system.
Problem 2: 🚫 Outbound Links
Nerfing
Nerf is a slang term in gaming that means "to reduce the effectiveness of". It's commonly used to describe the use of outbound links in social media. Outbound = to leave the current application to go somewhere outside (e.g., a website page).
For example, I write this newsletter on Substack (👋 Substack readers) and if I want to share it to X (formerly Twitter), I must generate a link (URL) and post that link on X.
However, X recognizes the domain of this URL. The X algorithm sees that the content is coming from Substack. Elon Musk does not like Substack, because he views it as a threat to X. Instead of showing my post to my 1200 + followers on X, 10 people see it. And they're probably bots anyways.
All that work I put into creating a compelling story that helps educate people, for free, and no one on my X account can see it because the X algorithm has thrown up a wall to block people from leaving X to go read it.
If someone sees the link and leaves X, that means they're not scrolling on X, which means they see less advertisements, which means X makes less money.
So, Elon punishes me for posting a link, nerfs the traffic to my post, and no one on X gets to read my valuable content I spent 100s of hours researching, thinking, and writing about 😢
But that's not the worst of it. Instagram doesn't even let me put a link in a post in the first place 🤷♂️ it has to go into my link in bio on my profile. Even then, when people view the link, they view it in an Instagram browser, rather than the original content itself.
I spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours building up audiences on these platforms, and if I try to show them what I actually want to show them, the algorithm punishes me.
Monetization
Effectively, each walled garden, each web2 social media platform, does its best to keep users on THEIR platform, not the platform of their competitors.
This battle between social media giants, making billions or trillions a year, comes at the literal cost of the creators that fuel their platforms.
The nerfing of outbound links means that creators can't monetize effectively. They give their content away for free on social media, and are penalized from marketing their own products properly.
Social media companies require monetization through VERY specific methods:
shop functions
ad revenue share
Unfortunately, ad revenue share doesn't usually work for smaller creators, as there is almost always a threshold to enable that monetization stream. This works best if they get millions of views a month on X.
Unfortunately, the shop function only works if the platform or the app store takes a cut (30% or more) of what the creator is selling. Furthermore, only specific types of goods can be sold in the shops.
In contrast, if someone visits my website (a decentralized system with no walls) I can include a link that allows you to directly purchase whatever it is that I'm selling in one-click. You can subscribe to my newsletter in one click. It's frictionless.
Even reducing ad-clicks to a two-step process (click on ad, put in cart), increases the likelihood of sale (conversion) by 180% 🤯. People drop off of the trail to buying something if there are too many clicks, they don't have the attention span to make it all the way or begin having second thoughts on the purchase.
This single-click purchase button is what enabled Amazon to become a market leader in the e-commerce business, preventing others from using that software for the full term of the patent (20 years).
Now that the patent is done, each social media company is leveraging it to only allow people to purchase/subscribe through their system.
Instead of allowing people to subscribe or pay directly to the creator, there is always a middle person siphoning the value.
Problem 3: Niche-Killing The Self
Algorithmic control of what we see on social media has EXTREMELY negative consequences on our lives. Literally.
Negative posts receive more engagement than positive posts (6x more), which creates a perverse incentive for algorithms to promote negative posts over positive ones. This leads to depression, anxiety, burnout, and feeling overwhelmed as people doomscroll, caught in a need to know how to survive things that aren't actually endangering them.
That's just on the consumption side.
On the creation side, algorithms form a character profile for each person who publishes on social media. Each post we put out trains the algorithm to understand who we are and what we have to offer their audience.
Unfortunately, people notice that if they post on a variety of topics, the algorithm gets confused, and shows their posts to less people. It makes sense, the algorithm doesn't know who the ideal audience is, so it can't put the posts in front of the right people.
This limitation forces creators to select a niche, a single posting topic, and share posts ONLY related that topic, over and over and over. As they post more, the algorithm learns, the posts get shown to the right audience, and the creator grows.
By this point, the creator has also been conditioned, trained to think that they can post only a single type of content if they want to get engagement on social media.
The creator is forced to fracture their sense of self and share only one small portion of it. The algorithm has painted them into a corner, put them into a box. Forced conformity upon them.
This inability to share the complete picture of the self is depressing. It feels like you can't be who you truly are.
No one likes to be suppressed 😢
Solution: Decentralized Social Media (DeSo)
All of these problems are derived from centralized control of feeds based on algorithmic suggestions. The algorithm is trained to monetize the platform you are on, and do its best to prevent you from leaving that particular walled garden.
Each company (Facebook, Instagram, Meta, X, TikTok, etc.) wants you to keep consuming content in exchange for your attention, or building content in exchange for access to an audience.
We need a way to break down the walls, or at least step through them to get out. A doorway between websites, rather than a wall. A portal between worlds.
Web3 provides a way out.
As a quick summary from last week:
web1 = READ (blog)
web2 = READ + WRITE (social media)
web3 = READ + WRITE + OWN (blog and social media and digital ownership with blockchain tracing)
Blockchain is a shared public dataset. A data network. Each identity that transacts with another identity creates a block that gets added to a chain. The data in the block is tagged with identities, so anyone on the public dataset network can read it and know who wrote it and who owns it.
Blockchain offers three solutions to the problems I listed above:
Blockchain-based networks are decentralized, not owned by a single entity, but spread across the world.
Blockchain-based identities enable the linking of a single identity across an infinite number of platforms.
Blockchain-based currency (cryptocurrency or NFTs) enable the ability to transact with one-click between identities, directly, without commission).
Again, if you're wondering more about web3, please see last week's entry for the issues with algorithms and the importance of changing how we move forward online.
Now to the issue at hand: how does blockchain tie into social media?
Introduction to Farcaster & Warpcast DeSo
I am going to keep this introduction as simple as possible. I will elaborate more on this decentralized social media (DeSo) system in future entries. The goal for now is to help you start thinking about social media differently.
This is not just another social media you "have" to drag yourself into. This is a fundamentally different way of doing all social media.
This system, like all social media, involves two elements: a protocol & a client.
Farcaster = protocol (set of rules of social engagement and communication)
Warpcast = client (software/application that reads the communications data of the protocol)
Farcaster is what tracks your data creation and ties it to an identity. Warpcast is an example of a client that can read the data on Farcaster and display it. Warpcast is kind of like a mix of X and Reddit.
As users interact with the Farcaster network, data is generated, associated with the username (identity) of the "caster" (poster). As the user interacts with other people, they create a social graph of interconnected data.
Warpcast reads this social graph and displays it to other people so they can continue engaging and building using the Farcaster protocol.
The data and rules are separated from the application that reads them. This means that ANYONE can build a new application that reads the data and display it however they want. The data is completely open to the world on a blockchain network, not hidden behind a walled garden.
If that's confusing, don't worry, I'll give some more examples in a moment. For now, you can think of Farcaster like an email address, and Warpcast like Gmail, Apple Mail, or Outlook.
I have a more technical explanation of Farcaster and Warpcast here if you want to understand more:
https://x.com/_wanderloots/status/1755269740069617871?s=20
For now, let's jump into how this system solves the problems listed above by:
Decoupling protocol from client (separating your identity/username from the social media itself);
Frames (outbound links that can be engaged with in-app);
Channels (organized posting into sub-communities, like on Reddit).
Solution 1: Decoupling Protocol From Client
What Is A Protocol? What Is A Client?
A protocol is a set of rules that tells Internet systems how to transfer data. For example, X (twitter) protocol involves: liking, posting, reposting, following.
If I click like, the like counter goes up on, and other people can see that I liked that post.
If I click follow, I now see that person's posts in my feed, and my account displays that I follow them.
It's the basic ruleset of social media, and each platform has relatively similar rules.
Another protocol you've probably heard of is HTTP (the prefix of most websites). HTTP is defined as:
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is **a protocol** that secures communication and data transfer between a user's web browser and a website. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP. The protocol protects users against eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks.
A client is the platform that reads the data from the protocol (the ruleset) and displays the data in a certain way. It is software, an application.
For example, on Instagram, posts are shown with an image, tags, and caption. You can see who posted what on their profile and it is displayed as a grid. The Instagram algorithm (part of the client) determines who sees what, and when.
On X (Twitter), posts are shown in a feed with text first and then an image. There is no grid, merely a continuous stream of posts that are shown on your profile. An algorithm determines who sees what, and when.
So in summary, you can think of the protocol as the rules that track data as users create it (posts, followers, following, sharing, saving, commenting), and the client is the display system application that shows you what the data looks like (a feed, follower count, # of likes).
Decoupling Protocol From Client
Social media as we currently think of it does NOT decouple the social data and rules (protocol) from the application that displays it (client). They are combined.
X (Twitter) is both the protocol and the client. The identities on X are usernames that are tied to an X account. If X wanted to, they could delete your account and all of your data and there's nothing you could do about it. Your identity is completely within the walled garden.
The Farcaster protocol fixes this issue, by allowing you to create an identity on the protocol (a Farcaster ID) that is not linked to any specific application. It stands on its own, connected to a wallet (for more on wallets, see last week's entry).
Here's a link where you can sign up for Farcaster using Warpcast. Note, we each get 50 warps (in-app currency ~50 cents) if you use this link 😊
Email Analogy
An analogy for this decentralized system is one you are all familiar with: email.
With email, you create an address (e.g., helloworld@wanderloots.com). I can then use that address to sign into any email client (such as Outlook) and pull all of my previously sent emails and contact list with me. I can then send emails from that email address.
If I get annoyed at Outlook, I can sign into Apple Mail, and start sending emails from there. Or do both at the same time. There's no limit to how many clients (apps) I can use to send emails from.
They are all associated with the email address itself, not with a specific platform.
Farcaster is the same way. Your Farcaster ID is tied to your wallet address (similar to an email address) and you can use it to sign in (connect) to any platform that accepts Farcaster wallets.
What freedom! You can choose the app you like best, you're not forced into using Meta or X forever. If someone builds a wall around your garden, you can just move the garden elsewhere.
Solution 2: Frames
In-line with this open ecosystem and flexibility to connect to whichever app you want with the same identity, the Farcaster protocol introduced frames.
Again, this is part of a much longer discussion, but I want to introduce the feature so you can start thinking about it.
Frames is THE solution to the outbound link problem. A frame is a way to display a link that is engagable within the client app (Warpcast) itself. You can think of it like a doorway or portal from the social media platform of Warpcast to your own website. You can see through the doorway without leaving the platform.
The outbound link is not penalized, it is celebrated.
The link can have buttons that frame the post itself and enable you to engage directly with the website that is linked.
Example: Instant Subscribe
The newsletter platform Paragraph enables direct subscribing within a frame.
So, I can post my newsletter on paragraph, copy the URL of the post, and share it on Warpcast. The URL triggers a frame, which adds buttons to the post. One of those buttons is subscribe. A user clicks subscribe, and their email address is automatically entered and they are subscribed.
An analogy: imagine I share my Substack newsletter on Instagram. By copying and pasting the URL, a subscribe button automatically appears with the post, so anyone who sees the post can instantly subscribe to the newsletter, without leaving Instagram.
They don't need to go to Substack and type in their email, it happens in one click. For example, see Paragraph's frame of Shaya's newsletter:
Example: Reading In-Line
The newsletter app Paragraph created a frame that enables a "read in-line" function. This means that when I copy and paste certain URLs into Warpcast, a read button appears with the post.
Users on Warpcast can click forward and backward and read my entire newsletter, paragraph by paragraph, within the app itself.
There is also a continuous subscribe button. If someone reads 3 or 4 paragraphs and likes what they see, they can subscribe in one-click to get future newsletters.
Example: Shopping
I can directly sell items from my shop within Warpcast itself.
I can copy and paste the URL associated with the frame and add a "buy now" button. When the URL is added to Warpcast, this button appears, and someone is able to use their connected payment method to buy the item directly.
E.g., Priyanka created a print shop that is crypto-enabled. She was able to share a link to the prints, and people could click on the button to browse her shop before deciding what to buy (at which point the link outbounds to her website for shipping details).
Depending on the frame, you can use warps (in-app currency) to buy the item without leaving the page (works for digital products, since there's no shipping to deal with).
This function is wildly powerful. It completely removes the walled gardens and app-store commissions.
It is the reason that Amazon became what it is, and it's now open to anyone, anywhere, anytime, using the Farcaster protocol.
Frames enables peer to peer purchasing without the need for a middle-person taking cuts along the way.
Similarly, you can mint directly within a frame on Warpcast using the native currency (warps). That means someone can use warps to mint an NFT, without having to use their main wallet connection, vastly boosting cryptographic security (more on this in another entry).
Summary of Frames
The layers between social media and individual websites are thinning. Frames allow someone to open a window directly to my website, which gives control of the engagement and presentation of my work back to me.
It also enables a customized building of memberships in a post-platform way. If someone follows me on Farcaster, they can get a different view of the frame than someone who doesn't follow me. I can customize the experience depending on the person viewing the link.
E.g., if you follow me, my print costs $10. If you don't follow me, it costs $15. The experience is customized for each user based on the social graph built into the protocol of Farcaster itself.
Effectively, frames allow for a micro-application to be built into social media. Gaming, commerce, storytelling, sharing, etc. Whatever the application style, frames enable a glimpse into the ecosystem of another website and adds buttons, which gives the control of link-sharing and community building back to the creator ✨
Solution 3: Channels
The final benefit is one that helps heal the fractured self I mentioned earlier. Instead of "niching down", as is the traditional approach to social media, you can be as many versions of yourself as you want using channels.
If you've ever used Reddit, you will understand the power of this feature. Reddit forms subreddits with r/subreddit. There's an r/space, r/substack, r/photography, r/art... etc.
The Farcaster protocol enables channels, which are tied to the identity of the person that hosts the channel.
For example, I created four channels: /cal /wander /story /mindfulness.
If I have a post related to travel, I'll share it to /wander. If I read a book and something resonates with me, I can share it to /story. If I do a mindfulness session and find something interesting, I can share it to /mindfulness. Finally, /cal is my place to share everything related to my art, writing, and brand of wanderloots, a place I can build a community of my own ✨
I am not limited by "wanderloots" to post only to one account with one algorithm. I can take the different versions of myself and share them where they belong, with the people who care about those topics.
Since channels are built into the protocol itself, if I choose to use a different client application (e.g., not Warpcast), the channels will come with me as part of the data bundle associated with my identity.
Imagine if you started r/space on web3 Reddit, and then wanted to take it to a new social app that wasn't web3 Reddit. You could take the posts and the community members with you and continue posting to that channel, and they would see it on the old platform AND the new one.
Not only can I take my identity, posts, and social graph with me, I can also take the community with me to any platform I want.
Imagine you've spent years building up #wanderloots on Instagram, and Instagram starts nerfing my links. Instead of being stuck with Instagram, I can just up and leave and go to Reddit and bring the wanderloots community with me.
Ideally, this means that you will only ever need to build one community for the rest of your life, as you will be able to take them with you anywhere.
You can build your True Fans once, instead of on every social platform that comes out in the future.
Future-Proofing & Looking Ahead
The Farcaster protocol completely opens up the way we think about sharing data on the Internet.
It's possible that thousands of applications will be built on this protocol (if there aren't that many already). Your Farcaster account enables you to access all of these + any future applications, all using the same identity.
This system brings us back to the way the Internet was originally intended, a decentralized system that fosters community and connection between like-minded people online. An open Internet.
Web3 can be thought of not just as a blockchain layer on the Internet, but as web1 + web2 = web3. We can bring the individual website functionality of web1 to the social media functionality of web2 with frames, tied together with a single identity to allow the ownership of web3.
The future is here.
Are you ready?
Next week
I realize that this was an incredibly complicated and long entry. I realize that you probably have many many questions.
Please feel free to leave questions in the email or by commenting on this post in Substack. If you have a question, many others will as well, so having a single place to answer them will help us all.
Ideally, send me a cast (post) in my /cal channel or send me a DC (direct cast) on Warpcast I can see that it will likely become my primary social media, if it hasn't already.
I will keep exploring Farcaster and Warpcast and will let you know the developments next week. Things are changing more rapidly than I've ever seen.
Stay tuned ✨
P.S. If you are interested in learning how I build my digital mind (second brain) to help me process information and identify patterns to solve my problems, please consider upgrading your subscription to paid. Your support means more than you know 😌 ✨
Paid subscribers get full access to Worldbuilding, a practical counterpoint to the theories described in Recalibrating. You also get access to a private chat and bonus explanations exclusive to paying members 👀
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Book of the week: Read Write Own by Chris Dixon
I just picked this book up yet and am excited to dive into it. I've heard great things from many people in the web3 space so I expect it to be a good read ✨
Photo of the week: Golden Monkey Close-Up from the jungles of Rwanda.
Thank you for the breakdown! Very helpful.