I like to remember the 2005 moment Facebook hit in its first existential crisis; build an ad machine like Google, or chase the wild unknown of social games? Back then the only social games model was Newgrounds.com, a chaotic pit of flash games and teen humor. Their whole “business model” was banner ads that paid in pocket lint.
Facebook stood at a greasy crossroads. Ads or FarmVille? Billboards or tractors?
Zuck chose to become an AD network. The dopamine slot machine won.
Fast-forward. Farcaster starts as a social network too — earnest, curious, purple. But you can’t hold a $1B valuation together with likes and vibes forever. Someone has to pay rent, even in Web3.
So I like to imagine Farcaster as the alternate-timeline Facebook — the one we deserved in 2005. Dumb jokes, blurry cat pics, $Clanker coins, FarmVille cows high-fiving in one feed. Everything messy, loud, alive. Like drunken cousins at Thanksgiving, but online.
At first, this felt impossible — how do you rewind the internet? Roll back the timeline?
Then history gave us a metaphor wrapped in drama: the Ethereum DAO hack, the great fork of Web3 that birthed Ethereum Classic.
One chain said “fix it.”
The other said “code is law, tough luck buddy.”
Two timelines. Same origin story.
Facebook had its own silent fork in 2004. One branch could have leaned into games, coins, user-powered economies — something like Ethereum-the-upgrade. Instead we got the attention-auction chain, where ads chase you like jealous stalkers and uncles yell politics at 3AM. The Ethereum Classic of social media. Nostalgic, frozen, remembered mostly for pokes.
Farcaster feels like the other branch — community upgrade instead of data extraction.
No Web3 banner ads stalking you for socks. Yet. (I expect Base Wallet to complete that vision).
No engagement-farm overlords.
Just people → creativity → mini games → money actually inside the system.
In this timeline, ads are fossils. For now.
The feed breathes.
Users carry the coins — not the product tags.
Farcaster, bless its pure hart, is rewinding the tape and picking up the retargeting pixels Facebook dropped. But this time the world has crypto. Digital quarters for the digital arcade. Not imaginary corn. Real coinz. Real stake.
Said differently,
Maybe I’m wrong. Probabbly speling is wrong too. But that’s fine. The goal isn’t to predict the future — it’s to name this moment loud enough that future us can look back and laugh that we ever called it social media. This feels more like a fork-jump, a timeline correction, and a second chance at 2004 with better toys.
Here’s to 2026 —
Where the cows come home, games print coins, and we get the Facebook we never got.