Friend.tech is gone, why should it be established? ——Where is the future of encrypted social networking?

Author: Pzai, Foresight News

Foreword

With Friend.tech’s daily activity plummeting to less than a hundred people, cryptosocial seems to be retreating from the limelight. On the one hand, social projects based on the crypto-economic model as the main model are fading from attention; on the other hand, crypto-social related applications such as Farcaster and Solana Blinks are making social interaction a means of diversion from different entry points, providing a new source of traffic for the ecosystem. Bring new growth possibilities. This article hopes to explore how to build encrypted social networking based on the characteristics of each project.

What’s wrong with Friend.tech?

Yes, the once famous Friend.tech is not mentioned by many people anymore. Some people may still miss the bustle of the crowd when they entered the market early, while others may miss the dopamine rush when buying and selling keys. Of course, I have to say that at the time, FT was a very good product. At least during that relatively bear market stage, the Ponzi social structure did provide a place for funds and players to gamble.

If the human social process is classified as the logic of realizing instinct (internal drive), they can be roughly divided into animal nature and group nature. Animality represents human beings’ pursuit of survival resources, while group nature guides humans to enhance individual identity through relationship connections. In the case of Friend.tech, we can see how it leverages this instinctive tendency to build its economic model.

• Individual-centered community construction: Consensus is built on the maintenance of individual influence, and the organic migration of influence brings the inflow of tokens and attention. The advantage of this model is that it can give early participating individuals the greatest degree of influence monetization and help individuals achieve a flywheel of influence. At the same time, similar cognition brings about the aggregation of consensus, generates certain endogenous value, and solves group pursuits.
• Transactions with Key as the carrier: As a voucher for accessing a specific channel, the value of Key itself is priced through the Bonding Curve, and resource aggregation is obtained through the growth of transactions. This aggregation is divided into early stages (through early adopters There are two stages: establishing the initial community) and the later stage (using the Key value as self-endorsement).

Obviously, such a construction has brought about some problems, including the restriction of growth caused by the ceiling effect, the resistance to building community consensus caused by high speculative participation, etc. As an anonymous former tycoon said, "(Friend.tech) eventually became speculation itself. No one wants to chat, they all just want to speculate on Key." It seems that when the participants themselves are not here for pure social needs, all The interaction within the protocol was quickly limited to the scope of the token economy, and the closed social model diverted many participants into different small communities, resulting in the overall content ecology being relatively dry, and the limited discussion space may be The restriction is based on the community derived from Friend.tech and limits wider interaction. In this situation, the social narrative is probably not sustainable, and the project team adopted a points incentive mechanism at that time, which also affected the confidence of the holders (for details, you can review the discussion about points written by the author).

Through the example of Friend.tech, we can see that there are many pain points in building a social network through the encryption economic model. For example, the economic model directly determines the continuity of social interaction within the protocol, and creators prefer economic demands within the protocol. For creators, financial incentives may not be one of the main driving forces for creation. What they need more is extensive interaction and collision of opinions. At this point, the economic model is doomed that the limited reach of creators is not suitable for many people. expectations. So what we are going to discuss next is how a rising star, Farcaster, a protocol driven by social interaction, achieves a certain level of communication and discussion.

(Some) Creators Thoughts

What did Farcaster do?

It can be said that Farcaster had almost no connection with the token economy when it was founded. The few points of connection may be that early participants had a strong crypto-native style, such as Ethereum OG and crypto investors. Thanks to founder Dan Romero's strict invitation-only screening, the quality of early users not only ensures social interaction, but also sets the tone for the development of the protocol, that is, a socially driven "new encryption community". This kind of community Different from general internal groups, and compared with applications such as X, it has a certain sense of community boundaries, which is conducive to the cultivation of community culture. Under the influence of crypto-native, the token economy is slowly entering the social process as an interactive carrier.

A more obvious example is the success of DEGEN, which was initially launched as a tipping reward token on the Farcaster Degen channel and airdropped to active members in the channel, and completed the following three points:

• Initial community construction: Passed Real social interaction builds a group with high interaction rate and strong consensus, and then generates strong growth based on this.
• Angel round financing: The angel round financing (490.5 ETH) led by 1confirmation in February became a favorable propellant for the development of DEGEN-related ecosystem.
• Construction of a sense of boundary: The interaction gap inside and outside the channel promotes people's curiosity and encourages people to discuss based on more community-based issues instead of just being limited to individual tweets, which condenses when improving user participation consensus.

From the perspective of daily life growth, DEGEN has become the beginning of everything, and has even become a cultural symbol of the Base ecology.

But at this time, people will also find that some resistance is emerging. DEGEN's distribution model has undergone mechanical changes such as active badges and staking, and each change is accompanied by the division and integration of consensus. And at the end of March this year, Degen Chain’s Layer 3 narrative was also in full swing. At that time, everyone believed that DEGEN was the future of Farcaster and even Base. The author believes that for a project with MEME as the main narrative point, Buidl means half-heartedness to the market, especially when the consensus building has not yet been settled. It is true that Buidl itself represents a long-term philosophy, but in the ever-changing encryption market, the ecological niche owned by each project is determined by the current status. If there is no real breakthrough in the construction of the ecosystem, then the climax will no longer continue.

It’s true to embrace the ecology, and having use cases is also a considerable progress. There are even projects in the ecology such as Drakula (Note: a Degen-supported Web3 Tiktok) to provide users with diversified services, but in the end the market enthusiasm begins When the tide recedes, there is no consensus. However, the author has always believed that Farcaster's innovation is already sufficiently advanced compared to other social protocols, including Frames, which exists as an interaction paradigm within the protocol, innovating the interaction process on the social chain and opening up third-party clients to allow project parties to co-construction, etc. And the most core point is: its social graph and framework are open and are the basis for everything. Therefore, the author believes that in the future, there will definitely be more organic use cases to provide fresh blood for the social ecology on the chain.

Blinks - A comprehensive solution

Solana Blinks embeds an interactive interface in the link and conducts transactions through an in-browser wallet. As an application with similar interaction logic to Frames, the two also have many similarities and differences:

• Reach: Solana Blinks’ multi-platform reach can achieve a wide distribution of users and conduct transactions directly through wallets. Frames interacts through the wallet address bound to Farcaster, and signs through the account instead of the wallet.
• Openness: Both allow developers to embed corresponding components in the front-end and extend the interaction methods, and the project parties are providing relevant support to developers.
• Integration: Ultimately, the goal of this type of interaction is to connect the user’s on-chain and off-chain experiences.
• Technical implementation: Solana Actions encapsulates on-chain transactions as APIs and implements universal front-end implementation through Blinks; Farcaster Frames converts static embeddings into interactive experiences through the OpenGraph standard.

In general, Blinks does not integrate social itself, but embeds on-chain behaviors into social flows to bring users a more customized experience. In other words, Blinks can be embedded in any flow (for example, Notion can be embedded), which leads to more use cases. We can also look forward to Blinks-based social streaming use cases in the future.

Conclusion

Building a social ecosystem that is organically integrated with the blockchain has always been a focus of the market, and the existing projects can be said to have their own merits. Just like the tide of the crypto market, the spotlight of attention will not stay forever. Therefore, project parties must follow the trend and design products based on respect for users and communities in order to carve out a path in the social track.

The big waves wash away the sand, let time give the answer it deserves.

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