What is Farcaster and How Does It Work? | A Technical Deep Dive

hi everyone s from Quick node here and today in this video let's learn about foraster a decentralized social media Network so without any Ado let's jump into it so before understanding what foraster is and how it works let's first understand why do we actually need a decentralized social media Network so the current social media platforms or the traditional ones like XG Tik Tok Instagram they all let a user create an account on their platform and then that user can follow another users and create posts react to another users post message another users etc etc all of this data is stored on a particular platforms centralized servers and these platforms controls what your feed looks like the feeds you see on these platforms are designed to make you stay on the platform for longer durations because that's how these platforms or apps earn longer the amount of time you spend on the platform more the number of ads you will be served and you will see and thus it will increase the revenue for these platforms and that's not it a lot of times these platforms can deplatform users or applications which runs on these platforms due to some policy changes or some API changes it has happened in the past like some platforms have completely discontinued a particular service which leaves the developers and users helpless and we have also seen some platforms making changes to their apis breaking a lot of thirdparty applications relying on their API this is where a decentralized social media platform can be beneficial where a user has complete control over the data the data is not stored on a centralized server or controlled by a centralized entity it is distributed and decentralized so that it cannot be manipulated easily or controlled by a particular single entity so that's what farcaster is farcaster is a decentralized social media Network where a user can create an account follow another users create posts send messages react to another user post just like they do on any other social media platform but the difference with farcaster is that the user is the owner of their own data and the relationships of themselves with another accounts foraster doesn't own that data and it's completely decentralized foraster is a network of decentralized social media rather than a platform so because it is a network there can be different apps which can be built on top of this Network apps are also called as clients and users can use any of the app based on their preference to access the network and to do various operations on the social media Network podcaster calls itself sufficiently decentralized Network which which means that it does not post all the data on blockchain but only post the data which is critical to security on blockchain so let's understand how faster works and how its architecture looks like so faster has three layers on a very basic level the first layer is the application layer or the app layer where there are different apps this is the layer user interacts with the second layer is the offchain layer the layer of hubs hubs are foraster node which stores all the user interaction data and messages of chain this layer is peer-to-peer and decentralized so whenever a user post a message it's stored on HUB and then it's replicated by another hubs on the network and then there is this onchain layer where foraster has few contracts deployed on the optimism blockchain Network the contracts being ID registry contract storage registry contract and key registry contract and now let's understand the functioning of each component with the help of a example so let's say a user wants to create a new account so what they would have to do is they would have to register for a new forecaster account with their ethereum address and then they can also register a recovery ethereum address using their main ethereum address so they can use a application which is also called as our Custer client like wcas to register for a new foraster account the application like wcas handles all the interactions with the onchain components in this case ID registry smart contract ID registry smart contracts handles all the mapping of ethereum address with the foraster ID or FID and also the mapping of the ethereum address with another recovery ethereum address so once it's registered foraster account can also be transferred to another person or another etherum address then a user would have to buy some storage credits because all the messages and interaction data is stored off chain on these forecaster nodes call Hubs a user has to pay for the storage one storage credit can be used to post multiple messages messages on farcaster can be of five different types first one is a cast which is just like your public post which you do on another social media platforms the second type is Reactions where you react to another users casts or post the third type is links which is the relationship between one user to another for example the data of a account following another account the fourth type is the profile data which comprises of the display name and display picture the fifth type is verification which is an ethereum address so during the recording of this video one storage unit of forecaster gets you 5,000 costs or public post 2,500 reactions 2500 links means you can follow accounts and 50 profile data which means that you can change profile data display name 50 times and then 50 verifications which means that you can perform 50 verifications you can also buy more credits once you are out of credits so the storage register smart contract is the Smart contract which keeps track of how many storage credits a particular foraster account owns and then when uh new app wants to interact with a farcaster account it needs a access key of that account so what happens is a user can generate a new access key for that account which lets a app post a message on their behalf so whenever a user wants to post a message using another app they would have to create a new key of their account by signing a message using their public key and all of this information around how many keys a particular forecaster account holds or how many keys are valid for a particular podcaster account is stored in key registry smart contract now what happens is whenever a user wants to send a message let's say they want to create a public post what will happen is they will sign the cast and then the cast is uploaded to the forecaster network using a hub so a app or client will send the message to a hub The Hub here does various set of operations it validates the message it checks the message for any kind of conflicts and then it propagates the message to another hubs on the network so it will validate the message by checking if the message has signature from one of the account keys of the forcaster account and then it will also check for properties like the message should be under particular characters etc etc and then the Hub also checks for storage conflicts or another kinds of conflict for example if the Hub already has the message or not it also checks for storage unit validation or limits for example let's say a person is posting a public cast or a public post and it is the 5,000 and1st cast of that person which is beyond the limit of 5,000 so in this case what the Hub will do is it will delete the oldest message of that person and make space for the new cast or the new post and once everything thing is done every the validation is done the Hub will store the message on its storage and then propagate it to another hubs on the network via a process called CET so in this way all the hubs gets the updated data and no matter which Hub is being accessed by a user it will have all the information about the forecaster Network so to summarize the data which is stored on chain is the account creation data data the storage units data and the account Keys data and every other data like the new cast or post user creates the relationship data like which account follows which account and reactions like a user reacting to another user cast or post is stored on the hubs network but that's not it since faster is a network rather than being a platform it offers another great functionality in terms of frames frames is nothing but a standard which lets users turn their casts or public posts into interactive apps and it has various use cases for example in a normal social media you can just post video audio picture Etc but with frames you can create a interactive post for example you posted a image and you have a button below it where uh viewer or another user who is reading your post or seeing your post can validate their wallet and mint that particular photo or another example Can Be You whitelist a certain number of your friends or people you know using their ethereum addresses and then when you post a particular image or video it's hidden from everyone and people would have to authenticate their ethereum addresses and the ones whom you have wi listed can only see the contents of that post so these are just a few examples but there can be innumerable number of examples using frames so that's what podcaster is all about it gives us a network of decentralized social media and it also gives us an ability to create our own functionalities within the network using frames standard so if you learn anything from this video make sure to hit the like button subscribe to the quicke YouTube channel and I'll see you in the next one bye-bye

Channel: QuickNode

Views: 1,352

Keywords: farcaster app, farcaster architecture, farcaster explained, farcaster protocol, farcaster tutorial, farcaster xyz

Id: IyQPsjopNwI

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024