Behind Farcaster: Characterizing a Hybrid Decentralized Social Network

Abstract

Decentralized social networks present independent alternatives to centralized counterparts, yet there are open questions about their efficiency and long-term viability. Recently, a new class of hybrid social network has emerged, which combines blockchain-based and off-chain operations to balance availability, performance, and sustainability. Farcaster was the first and largest hybrid social network to adopt this strategy. It combines on-chain identity management with peer-to-peer content dissemination via independent servers (aka hubs). In this paper, we present its first large-scale empirical study, analyzing 240 million user-generated messages (aka casts) across the platform and focusing on 3,000 independent hubs. We uncover asymmetries that challenge the platform's core goals of availability, performance, and sustainability. Many hubs exhibit repeated periods of non-responsiveness, and the network struggles to maintain a consistent state across hubs. Moreover, infrastructure centralization emerges due to hosting concentration and network topology skew. While gossip-based dissemination enables rapid initial delivery, achieving full consistency remains challenging: on average, 80 % of hubs' casts reach half of other hubs within 9.2 minutes, whereas the remaining 20 % require up to 57 minutes. Finally, despite collecting over $2.6M in storage fees, there is no redistribution to hub operators, raising concerns about long-term sustainability. Our findings provide pointers for the design of hybrid and decentralized social platforms.