Farcaster

Farcaster is a social network protocol with a deliberately unusual property: an account and its messages are not owned by a single application. A user registers an identity, and posts are stored in a way that any client can read, so several applications can serve the same social graph. Messages are signed by the user's key and stored on a peer-to-peer network, with the identity registered on-chain. Because the graph is public and portable, a client is a view rather than the network itself, and a user can move between clients without losing their followers. Frames, an embedded interactive post format, made the protocol useful for applications beyond reading a feed. The model has real friction. Registration costs money, the user experience of managing a wallet and keys is unfamiliar, and the network is much smaller than a mainstream platform. Its appeal is to people who want the social graph to be a public good rather than a company's asset.