POV: there is no influx of people waiting to join Farcaster once it goes permissionless other than airdrop farmers. 1. We use Ethereum, so anyone anti-crypto is won’t be convinced in the near term 2. Existing apps are too similar to Twitter, with way less content New types of apps / behaviors for growth.
Ideally user doesn’t know FC is underneath. Mostly useful for devs to know and care. But how do you teach someone the portability of their social data when Twitter/instagram walled gardens is what they are used to?
Staying invite gated until 1M users doesn't sound too crazy, no?
How many potential FC users do you see in crypto right now?
We need some FarmVille-like web3 games built on top of FC. Getting access to 10k+ crypto power users, sharing scoreboards in the feed, trending NFTs tab - seems like a good deal for game designers.
Any thoughts on a way for the Merkle team to showcase FC native apps without explicitly endorsing? There’s a bit of a cold start problem on breaking very far away from existing mental models for apps and some sort of bootstrapping of attention could help more builders try moonshots w/o the a16z Mandate of Heaven
Who controls the invites now? I seem to have to bug you. Mine is greyed out on the web client. Is there a plan to allow members to invite other people? Maybe that is a compromise?
Thanks. I received the 10 you sent me. I sent one to Sean Lennon who I have communicated with on Twitter, but I don't know if he will respond. But I for one would love to have him here.
It feels like the days when I first got invited to Gmail with gb of storage, which at the time was revolutionary. I think you will follow the same path.
One key differentiator from Twitter, at least for me, is transporting followers across clients. But I also heard my Warpcast followers wouldn’t necessarily be available on another client? Can you clarify that?
100% agree. You need a social app with a big differentiator. Maybe merkle tree could kickstart another app built on top of fc. Or highly support another client that is growing in a different user space.
I feel like the only thing that keeps twitter alive now is the spaces feature. If one of the new socials could tap into that- it would likely create a lot of demand.
What if you position Warpcast more as a social marketplace? Discuss, discover, buy and sell NFTs and tokens all in one place. Use DCs to negotiate.
Minor quibble:
I’d focus on Ethereum builders. The more of them you onboard, some % convert to building on top and attracting consumers with various use cases. Can sweeten the deal with grants/protocol upside for apps that’s grow protocol DAUs.
FC could be LinkedIn for web3 professionals. Invite only. 3 invites per month per person or stg like that
You need to be appealing to crypto subgroups in order to grow. People won’t join if their dao/protocol/nft community are all using Twitter still. Having coordinated migrations between all members has a better chance of sticking than every man for himself.
💯 we need more niche, new types of apps. imo Farcaster is bigger than crypto despite ethereum tie. can hubs sync over local mesh networks? rural parts of world/US need hyperlocal apps
The main thing is snowballing content. You need people who produce content on farcaster and no where else. A few rock star content creators and people will check in occasionally just to see. The hurdle to check farcaster is not that high. But coming in and not seeing new content kills momentum to check in to the app.
Dan Forcaster is great, quality vs quantity first.I wish we had a web 3 book 📚 store built in here Also web3 podcast
Now that twitter no longer enforcing narrative compliance, FC has lost its attractiveness for that user base. Alternative use cases need to be identified to address unmet needs -- I think Facebook users are a good target audience, for example.
yeah the people will come for new use cases, the underlying protocol will happen to be farcaster. same as people will come for new use cases and the underlying technology will happen to be crypto
I have not used BlueSky much since downloading it. It's just clunky.
I would argue that farcaster is well positioned to attract crypto skeptics / people fleeing Twitter to mastodon bluesky. Need to build better curation features for them and encourage more “debate” and “high stake” conversations to happen here.
There are some features of Farcaster that make it less poised for a major 'influx
There was a point when Lens was more decentralized than Faracster, but now that has reversed. Hubs was a good choice because IMO without its own network that can be optimized a web3 social network can't scale. Lens has become more and more centralized. Wrote some scattered thoughts on this last year https://t.ly/XhBU-
I wrote some thoughts on this https://jam.so/jjcJMh
Example of "new kind of app": Stealcam. App enabled by Eth. Should be something that fun, but FC-native.
The small meetups are something to focus on imo. That’s extraordinary. Don’t think you see that elsewhere. Have NFT, go to event, those that hold first NFT become farcaster originals in that city. Kernels of community that supersedes online and connects blockchain to human connection.
Warpcast (maybe?) can be path to ambassadorship aka Farcaster Originals who start meetups all over the world. Humans need human connection, that’s where there’s opportunity to be small and mighty. Less about broadcasting and more about connection.
n00b question - why would airdrop farmers have an interest in this? Literally just in the event a token drops eventually?
Given the tidal wave of AI-generated content starting to wash over Twitter, maintaining scarcity and veracity may actually drive engagement long term. Social media will need some kind of "truth"/ consensus mechanism pretty imminently... Farcaster difference?
Protocol could partner closely with a couple of apps with divergent use cases that can focus on user needs and translate into protocol needs, allow Merkel team to focus on protocol with losing product focus. Align with token incentives Decouple and build the protocol stack concurrently
Need to have more different people and communities that are somewhat not related to crypto at all so that niche communities grow and then expand the network effect for example with Twitter you have tech Twitter,NBA Twitter,Black Twitter and etc
Are accounts with limited activity still getting periodically deleted? Im hesitant to tell others about farcaster if thats still happening
unrelated to the topic. But should give some thought as to how to structure and present complex conversation threads. There are multiple conversation threads here and its interesting to see differences in presentation between wc and jam. Neither has cracked the right organization for this imo. Hard to follow
Could I make a service or not that would send people a NFT if they reply to a cast or send a payment to a smart contract. Not sure how to manage the gas transaction fee.
It’s a tough nut to crack. For me I check FC rarely because I am on Twitter/etc to engage with an audience, ideally large and growing. That is missing here. I can connect with people on Twitter or FC. I can reach an audience on Twitter but not FC.
Have a financial incentive or accelerator program to help other apps get built on Farcaster
I'm pretty impressed with what alphacaster is doing. Could Farcaster be a general "pluggable" social/communications layer for dapps (ala Disqus)? Opportunities with dexes, web3 games, blogs, etc.?
Random thoughts: 1. Add a sign up form to the homepage. Collect emails. Even if you don’t give immediate access. 2. Seed phrase login doesn’t work for the masses. 3. Might be able to get large numbers over with a few mega celebs joining. Someone like NYT that lost their blue check.
I don't think point 1 is relevant. Anticrypto users don't even need to know this uses crypto
I think this is probably accurate. Lens started with a stronger brand and developed demand earlier. Farcaster is better, but less differentiated and doesn't have as compelling a story or brand. Both of those things are easily fixed.
I go to social media to learn new things and be entertained. I feel like on farcaster I dont get the feeling that the app is caught up with crypto discussions or creating entertaining content/memes.
Some new forms of marketing will be required to expand outside the eth builder community. My naive take is that other dev/creator/builder communities could be good matches, and would leverage the current grain of the platform. Open platform social network for builders would be pretty powerful.
Naive question but does bluesky not have the same anti-crypto problem? Seeing a shocking number of my web2 software developer crowd show off their new bluesky profiles
This is also a marketing issue. It requires research to build early to mid adopters and have them generate interest while we build community.
I think you are right. How do you think about giving 3rd party limited amounts of invites based on proposals with a clear onboarding / selection process? The more additional use case (away from Twitter) and better selection they provide the more invites.
A few thousand crypto users is an extremely strong origin point, wonderful to get there.
@dwr I see bsky is prioritizing crypto/nft project founders for onboarding atm…
community within a community within a community for now. Network effect dictates that those who hate Twitter remain on Twitter. Farcaster needs to get on to sticky S curve and critical mass which could be a derivative of further blockchain adoption with or without user abstraction build
It is built and we came, this is just the beginning. Also: "In April 2007 Twitter had 50,000 active weekly users. What’s most interesting is the rabid Twitter usage by active users – they send an average of 15 Twitter message per day."
Everyone is trying to reinvent Twitter (good MVP) but we actually need a brand-new-everything-social-media