Community Onchain Virtual Summit Day 1: Building communities with Farcaster channels and OpenRank
Aired Date
February 21, 2025
Series
Special Event
Episode
Community Onchain Virtual Summit Day 1
Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/xEqSIu8eYv8gm farcaster and all the ships at sea we are here for a special summit today we're doing a virtual summit for the next hour and a half we're gonna have three panels we'll be doing the same tomorrow and this was the brainchild of sahil so sahil while i tweet this out and tell people we're live and cast it out and tell people we're live tell everyone sort of what why you came up with this idea like what's the purpose behind it and what we're hoping to accomplish here in these panels today
morning and thanks so much naulish praw for putting this together that's all the the hard work that you've put in really that i wanted to highlight and we'll we'll talk more about it through the next couple of days but it's definitely not my brainchild it is something that i had the opportunity and privilege to you know help surface we've been working with a lot of developers and community builders on farcaster and i think more specifically in the last six months we've just gotten closer to all the folks who manage run channels on farcaster they're trying to build communities with channels and i think we've heard a lot of their pain points we've learned their excitement about how they wanna use leverage the social graph of our caster and also building legos really with channels with frames and how can they you know run their communities here so we wanted to use this as a platform for them to share their vision their pain points and really collaborate together i think it is one of the and we've all spent a lot of time on crypto twitter and in the last too much time and i think for especially this week forkastr is a special place it may seem like a bubble to a lot of people on crypto twitter which is fine that's alright but but i think in this space you have people who actually wanna do better they wanna try and use this open social graph for doing things that which we all kind of you know hope for and it's really not possible on on web two platforms or on crypto twitter so i think with channels the vision is to actually try and form great communities which can survive which can thrive which can incentivize which can use crypto rails and there's a lot of exciting things that many channel mods are doing so we thought let's bring them together let's just do an exchange of ideas let's learn from each other and let's see how we can set everyone up for success and i think for us from the open rank team we've been you know building a lot of infrastructure for for caster we're also working on an app for communities and clients built on farcaster so so yeah i think there's a there's a lot of things that we thought would resonate we'll we'll get feedback so yeah excited about the next couple of days there's a bunch of different teams on how we can leverage channels to build communities what are the tools missing for people who run channels even for end users who wanna consume content for a particular topic let's say parenting or founders or even fun memes right
two of
my favorite two all three of my favorite channels
yeah and and they're amazing spots on our caster and i would say on the internet but how do we actually grow and scale them so so yeah a bunch of exciting
so that's the discussion that's the discussion for today and we've got our first panel the farcaster difference how to become a community entrepreneur and i'm gonna bring up our other two panelists humpty and ted and let's do a quick level set so he'll we didn't do really an intro with you but you're building open rank ted if you wanna do a quick intro and then i'm gonna go to humpty and then we'll dive into some questions so to you ted
hi i'm ted hey i have i just joined the farcaster team last week oracle team last week but before that i was an early power user and built and loved the farcaster community whether it was club ted or farcaster fridays or farcon so i've just been around the farcaster community for a long time and love it and yeah hopefully that's a good intro sorry
it is a great intro community builder extraordinaire is your true title let's let's be honest that's the real title here and then and second to only maybe humpty for the crypto so humpty can you give us a quick intro to your background and why you're here with us today
shamar buddy thanks so much for having me on great to see so many friends so if you haven't heard of me which is very likely i'm humpty i am the creator of crypto
i'm like
i've been in the space since about 2016 and throughout it all it's all about it's always been about education how can we get people onto crypto in ways that are meaningful working with you know them to try to make this whole very complex space a lot more accessible recently we've been pivoting crypto sapiens or should i say focusing crypto sapiens to talk to creators we know that creators are doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to crypto and gm forecaster is a great example of this in terms of helping us understand what's new and novel what's important how can we connect with others like us how can we find our tribes through channels so advocating for that on farcaster and so yeah that's really my role in the space and you know crypto sapiens the channel on farcaster has become a home for creators who are looking to understand what tools are available to them in this ecosystem so that they can grow a community and so that they can also make more money on chain
awesome i love it all right we're going to dive in the open rank team has been hard at work pulling together some questions for our panelists and ted we have the first one going to you in your experience on war cast what is the vision behind channels and how can user interaction evolve this and then second to that what shifts are you seeing in how communities want to own and operate their channels so first sort of like i think you can even speak to you've been here a hot minute f i d 02:39 so you were here pre channels you were here when channels launched you were here post channels like what do you see happening there and and how can we make them better
yeah let me also just preface this this is like my personal opinion
this is
not reflective of the team
so
she's only been there for a week
yeah you say uh-oh do you wanna get myself in trouble
ted we we will assume this disclaimer is true for anything you say today so don't worry
yes please keep that disclaimer on there for don't snug get her fired
let's see so when the network was smaller when i first joined it was like very easy to find people that you connected with or to find shared topics of interest and hobbies and discussions because it was small in nature so it's like when you're at a party or like a dinner party it's just like really easy to run into that and then as the network grew obviously that became more difficult it's like trying to find a friend and like a huge concert venue much harder and so channels emerged as personally like i think a great way to like a great discoverability mechanism it's like okay like let me find people who are talking about food or like let me go find content about books let me go find content about the super bowl or nba playoffs there was a lot of different ways and so i found it as a discoverability mechanism and i think that's where i found it and liked it was oh i can discover other people who are casting about this it's less ephemeral and more once something's in a channel it can stay there and so well if i didn't see it in my timeline then i might be able to go there and find new content and i think as last year we experienced massive growth and influx and spam and then these kind of open channels made it like where it used to be high signal to noise ratio that kind of got warped and so where they ended up transitioning to was like okay these are for communities they're less so like these open interest topics they're not hashtags like they should be specifically for communities and i think that was a great transition for people who are here and existing and like know how to use them i think where there's still a lot of work that can be done is like how do people discover them like how do you actually utilize them best is it actually like now because people aren't using them as much or they're just putting stuff into the home feed like how does somebody who's new and wants to learn about the creator experience know to go to crypto sapiens or somebody who's doing media know to go to kind of like on chain media and i don't know if we've necessarily like cracked that yet and i think some of like the permission levels and whatnot hasn't necessarily been there so i don't i think we're still figuring it out but that's like my like love story with channels is like oh i found this as like a way to meet more people which like as somebody who loves community that serves an amazing purpose how i would navigate and find and discover and visit them today i don't know if we've optimized that within the warp house client but i do know that there's people who love channels for that purpose so
me being one of them i love channels and i will say that i think some of there's so many different use cases too and for me like the ephemeral channels are really helpful for what you're talking about discoverability so for example the super bowl channel like people that i normally interact with may not be interacting with the super bowl and may not care so i wanna find those people who are watching this thing that i'm watching and then we can interact so that made it very easy to do that so i think that has a purpose as well as more of the longer term like community channels and to you humpty on that note longer term community channels for you in your experience in nurturing communities like crypto sapiens what unique features or tools can we offer channels to create a self sustaining community and that is from the open rake team
yeah so you know one of the things that i found incredibly difficult when working with channels initially was that everybody who was coming into my channel kinda was being treated with the same hand as everyone else on the firecaster like there's one algorithm to rule them all so whatever's happening on firecast or whatever's or should i say warpcast whatever is being applied to warp cast is being applied to my community channel you know in warp cast and what that meant was that visibility was a challenge for people who were coming into the channel and trying to engage and connect with us if you were not necessarily a badge holder at one point i remember a power badge holder there were challenges with the way that you could you know connect and and and and engage with comments and have others see you so when i started seeing like these moderator bots that allowed me to segment or shelter my community from the warpcast algorithm to me i found that to be incredibly powerful one it reduced a lot of the administrative overhead for you know channel owners but also it allowed me to set a set of rules for yeah that people could follow and they could understand very easily what are some of the things that we'd like for them to be casting into those channels sierra just kind of superpowered that idea you know they're and and even more recently with what they've done with dynamic leaderboards i think to me this is a really good way to surface people who are contributing regardless of their activity outside of my channel on warcast altogether and i think this is really powerful because as we talk about new people coming into fardcaster which anyone who i meet who's in the crypto space i always encourage them to come on to fardcaster it is difficult for them to find their tribe and to connect with people because they're small accounts for whatever reason they may not even be using the platform the way that the you know team intends for the platform to be used and so they may be labeled you know or might not be but it's very difficult for them to connect with you know communities that are meaningful to them and people as well and so when they come into the crypto sapiens channel that is moderated by kira that also has a channel token they're able to not just be seen but they're also able to be rewarded by our channel for their participation and if for some reason the webcast algorithm believes that my like my recast my comment is valuable then if if they're contributing or adding value to my community if i like recast or comment to what they're sharing in my channel if that can help them grow within the network as a whole i think that's super powerful and so that's how i believe like channels play a very important role on farcaster and warcasts specifically and how you know tools like cura can help to enhance the experience especially for new users
yeah that's a great point for new users if they can find channels that they really connect with i think it also helps them stick a little better too it makes it a little more sticky for them ted ted i want to go back to you and just see if you have any comments on that and also what we there's also different approaches to channels completely like you have some that are more like announcements and then you have more more like community and i know you've built different ones that you know when i think about far con that's more like announcement sort of level but club ted was very much a community so in terms of like the tools that we have is there anything that you've found really valuable that you've incorporated into a channel that you've found helpful
let me think through this i so i think someone like humpty and humpty's done a phenomenal job at this is that like being a community builder like really owning and managing and like wanting the best experience is like unique you know i think we take for granted like everybody can't do that like some people just like don't their brains aren't worried that way otherwise people don't have time or energy to do it so like there's a whole variety of reasons and so my thing is like okay we should actually make it as easy as possible or as intuitive as possible for people like humpty or myself to be able to do some of these things so that's like number one is like i think that and then you should show them as like a best in class example of like okay here's how to do it i think other people who might have a desire to do it but not like a natural inclination want a playbook like want what are the rules of the road like how can i learn how to do this so that's one thing from there that's one and i think the other thing is that you mentioned is like the new user experience is again i think about like showing up to your first day of like university and you're like oh there's a bunch of like i need to make friends like how am i gonna make friends here either you know some people ahead of time so like oh you've like connected and made those ahead of time that's really hard to do on warpedcast unless somebody onboards you personally and there's no way to easily connect your contact book nobody has each other's phone numbers anymore so then it's like okay you go to like oh but it's like let me go to like the club day or like the sorority or fraternity stuff or like let me figure out like what i can do here and i think channels can act as that especially because a lot of people on warpcast like aren't necessarily recognizable the same way that when you join twitter you have like a whole list of celebrities that you can follow so i think that channels can serve as like oh here's like let me go explore what's out there and like find a place where i can get my footing quickly or more quickly before i decide to put in time and energy and effort because i think it's just easier to start replying to things versus like hey let me put a cast out there it goes into the void so that's just just what i would say is i think the new user experience is really important and channels can help improve that if done the right way
when you bring in somebody new and you've done that a jillion times do you give them like here's some channels that i think you should check out or do any kind of like onboarding in that way
when people join we
just added that to the invite right i think the invite has that now
the invite does have channels but i think you can only recommend the channels that we can send out
oh true like the ones that are open to everybody yeah this is probably it yeah
yeah but i found that they instead like what i found to be like the most impactful is actually i'll be like oh just like make an intro post say what you're interested in and then i just cc like i'll reply with like cc ing the people that i think are like would be interesting for them to follow only because it's hard for me to stay up to date on all the channels and so and then you don't want to recommend a channel that like i'd be like oh this is great but like the last post is showing from a month ago it like seems stale so i kind of just tag people in and hope that they'll respond but that's at least what i've done to date and i think that's a product of not again channels not being the perfect ux or the ideal ux
true and hamdi you were nodding your head so i'm guessing that maybe you do some introing of channels to folks you bring in
yeah absolutely
i mean
it's like yeah of course
the first thing i do is that because the crypto sapiens channel
i mean technically when like for example i'm hosting an event in december and it's focused on on chain creators the first thing i'm gonna ask them to do is just join farcaster and connect with the crypto sapiens community because we keep the conversation going there
yeah
right i'm an advocate for farcaster right as an advocate for a farcaster i need to make sure that their experience is a you know a pleasant one and in order to do that i can't just throw them into the void and have them cast and nobody engaged and then potentially be marked as spam that that that'd be horrible they would churn and i don't think anybody wants that certainly i don't wanna be advocating for something where people are gonna have a bad experience so as an advocate for a farcaster i'm also a steward you know i bring them into the crypto sapiens channel i have rituals where they can participate in conversations so it's like i think there's like three different rituals per week where they can comment and all of
the people
to be clear rituals are not like some kind of oath sacrifice this is actual the rituals that are built into channels where you can set a prompt that'll go out automatically so just to be just for those who may not know i don't want them to think you're doing some kind of weird animal sacrifice
yeah i mean i've used humankind candles all over my house you know so some might think that i have a ritual going on now it does smell very beautiful in here
they already think we're called humpty we don't wanna make it worse
it's okay we're we're the nice kind anyways you know that that's that's what i do like i bring them into the channel and i have the conversation there and i nurture that relationship and as their as their own audience grows as they find their tribe outside of crypto sapiens you know they're more successful and better for it but yeah that's absolutely do recommend channels and if there are other channels that i would recommend i would definitely connect them similar to what ted said to those individuals one thing i thought about as ted was talking about and i believe actually you you kind of kicked that off in terms of like these set new set of channels that people can start with starter packs you know it's a great way to connect people to individuals but i think starter packs as far as channels go would be also a wonderful idea in terms of like saying hey are these your interests these are some of the channels you should follow right because yeah again i'm still bullish on channels i think part of the reason why we're having this conversation is because there's a very like there's two camps to farcaster right you have your everything goes on the main feed it's like twitter and then there's the other camp like everything goes on channels because it's like reddit there's still a bit of like confusion in terms of the way that you're supposed to engage on farcaster but i do believe that you can succeed with both or either yeah as long as you're connecting with individual channels and people in a meaningful way you know being strategic not just kinda like casting random stuff into the void either
right yeah especially when you're new you definitely helps to have somebody stewarding you ted i love that with the intro post but also starter packs are an easy way to like even enhance that experience i'd love to see channels added to starter packs so have it be users and
and channels for topics that way you have sort of everything in in one spot sahil i want to get you into this conversation question for you as a champion of channels on farcaster how can tools kira offers help enhance engagement or address better channel user experience and i'd say like any other tools as well that you may recommend or feel is helpful
yeah so i i think great points by ted and hamdi and actually i don't wanna talk about cura as much but this is really great okay i as you mentioned as you titled me as the champion of channels
it's your it's your you know your team's trying to trying to slide in those moments for you so you know give him the questions you know
i i i think it's a it's a safe space i i love to take the contrary bet on farcaster where i do feel like channels have a huge potential there's something special and i think just to piggyback on last on the last point that humpty made i think with broadcast there's too much of a burden for forecast to kind of drive a bunch of you know top of the funnel you know usage onto the forecast or social graph but with amazing primitives of course with frames with channels with with so many other tools for devs i think it is a good moment in time where we do see that there's twitter like mold or form factor and there's reddit like mold and form factor i think there's a fair you know stab at at seeing if it works and it has to be emerging and i think channels are are fitting into that community's persona pretty well and we have to do justice so because this is it's a special moment in time we we almost have a a great the i don't wanna like you know this is so we use this so often in crypto it's like decentralized tech stack or decentralized this and that right but it actually is true you can have your identity in cryptorails on ethereum or whatever chain you can have an open social graph finally on forecaster and you can have your own feeds algo curation permissionlessly right and i think you finally have that and this is kinda what gives us an opportunity to create piggyback on that and create you know communities which are open autonomous not dependent on centralized kind of you know let's say algos or or or whatever and let them flourish and i think wordpress doesn't have to try and cater to all of this and that's where openranc's been really trying hard to understand if there's a space where we can take a stab at that and we'll we'll probably hopefully see a few experiments in the next few weeks but i do feel like that is the mindset that we're bringing in and i think one of the analogy that i i we talk a lot about in the team is a channel today on farcaster more specifically is like a city in a state where it's still governed by the state you know governance the rules which is like people complain hey warbucks why are you giving me the fee sure you know there's there's only one real estate that warbucks can cater for and you have to abide by the rules they've already done a good job in giving you you know opportunity with all these tools you can keep your channel in a public mode or private mode so there's a bunch of things which are already there for for you to go and run your city but i think channels can be like an island nation almost like there's supposed to be these different places on the internet where the the person who has who's who's actually spending so much time like humpty or ted or many others who actually invest so much time daily if they're given the right tools or if they have a pretty easy they don't have to spend ten hours just probably spend you know a couple of hours and that just creates a great experience for users and they don't they can exist permission at least so you can have a base channel you can have a region channel you can have a politics channel without having to define the same mold that all of these channels have to subscribe to right and i think one of the difficult yet paradoxically great things about channels is you can't fit channels into a single mode there are so many different channel personas there's so many different intent intentions you might find a certain channel spammy if you're on webcast but there's a pretty solid community that just wants to exist on that channel and talk about whatever in whatever language on whatever topic and that's fine let them be but you might get great content on politics if you're in the us you're following elections you have that audio at e ten where you might find a channel to be super useful for seeing what folks are doing what high signal what what ted was mentioning what are the high like high signal content around a particular event and that's your place that you spend a lot of your time on on webcast because of that right so you can let all of these things be with channels if you if you give them the right tools so i think that's really our north star is create those open spaces and i the loose analogy is reddit i i i do think that's a form factor which is kind of exciting and that's where we want to get to and we've been with just just with with cura just having spent a lot of time with channel mods what are their pain points trying to stitch that experience together and i think that is kind of the exciting thing because specifically in crypto you can see a lot of people actually are a part of discord channels they're a part of telegram groups they're a part of chats and some of these and even meme coins are actually communities around the token and they have so much kind of you know conversation happening
not all of them but yeah not all of them
not all of them but but it's it's a stretch it's a stretch but but i think that that the whole idea for community we wanna just give the right kind of stack for them to and forecast is a great place to take a stab at that so so yeah i think that's kind of my you know a a stream of thoughts on on channel if you may i had a lot of coffee so i i had a lot to to throw out there
no that's awesome and i we're about to shift to panel two and i do want to i'm trying to show this and it's not letting me show there we go this is a question for ted how do we cultivate more community builders on farcaster besides tooling what else do we need to do and this is probably a great question for you but also like thinking in terms of growth of the network itself too in general so yeah what do you think ted
that's a great question and i think that's part of what i'm looking to do as part of the team and so i think it starts with like chatting with gm forecaster community crypto sapiens community and understanding what their pain points are and how we can improve that experience which i don't know if we've has put time and effort into before i also think too just celebrating them and using them as an example is helpful i think there's a lot that like it goes a long way to just be like wow i see what you're doing and it's amazing and let us know how we can help and support and so shifting into that but if i had a good answer for it i would tell you but not there well come back to me in like two weeks
perfect yeah i mean we should give you at least a minute on the job before we expect results this has been awesome this has been panel one we are going to shift gears and move to panel two so we're gonna reset but thank you all three bye ted thank you so much humpty stick around don't move i'm going to be moving some people around here we're going to bring up shazo andre eric and phil and also i'm going to bring up gloria and i am going to disappear for a minute and gloria if you want to come on screen gloria is going to be our moderator for this panel so i'm going to move myself down and turn it over and for panel two just to intro this we're gonna talk about progressive ownership for communities and continuing to sort of focus on those channels that are community focused so gloria i am turning it over to you so unmute and i'll be down
great so we're already starting awesome two minutes two minutes late well thank you guys so much for your time today to have this discussion so i'm gloria and i work with the open ran cura team so we're building for communities on focaster to have better tooling to kind of grow and do more amazing things but today's conversation for this particular panel so glad to have you all because i know you have been expert practitioner and champion and thinker on this topic which is about like how do we leverage you know this special you know offering from web three that is tokenization but now to make it hyper financialized for community building rather than to leverage its power to actually serve communities but before we jump into the conversation i just want everyone to maybe give like a one two sentence introduction of yourself so yeah a little bit of like your journey and who are you and so what you're passionate about let's maybe start from the screen so humpty do you wanna kick off
sure jim everybody for those of
you who don't know me
you weren't part of the previous conversation then i'm humpty creator of crypto sapiens we've been running a media platform for a little over three years now started as a podcast continued to evolve as an incubator for creators and is now a community focused on creators to help them come on chain meaningfully and grow their audience and make more money through the distributions that we have here and farcaster is one of the tools that we use in our tech stack to be able to help creators do that so excited to be here
hiya thank
you oh
my next cool
yeah andrea yeah
sure my name is andre i'm i'm shazo on the internets i'm mainly an independent open source developer maintain a bunch of big open source libraries the latest one i'm working on is whatsabi and it makes helps it make ethereum front ends more decentralized i have a little bit of experience building little communities here and there of of like cofounded a dao and stuff like that but just mostly focusing on improving decentralization across the stack
cool i can go now i'm eric it's it's nice to be on here been on farcaster since early twenty twenty three know a lot of you guys from the feed i guess you'd consider me more of a user like you know a creator someone that's new to you know putting my work on chain and also building community on on farcaster itself background is more in the traditional financial space been in crypto since 2017 and yeah really just looking to bring artists together on farcaster to help grow grow the grow the protocol overall
awesome joe
i guess i'm i guess i'm up hi nice to see you again gloria
my name is phil i have been on farcaster since maybe 2021 i think i ran into dan in venice where i was living at the time and we were starting bright moments i spend a lot of my time these days helping artists put work on chain and get paid for it
awesome i think you guys are too humble you guys probably are the trendsetter the the thought leader on podcast also the first question basically i want to kind of dig out some of your insights and experiences what has you what have you been observing the experiments on utilizing tokenization for building communities do you have any examples you find novel or interesting you wanna share
anybody
yeah i can kinda jump in i think one of the one of the things gloria i know we've had a couple calls with jc the guy that i've been helping he runs the nature channel i also talk with inceptionally from i took a photo and some of the other bigger creator channels and one of the things that that i notice first and foremost on farcaster is it's it's highly participatory like a lot of people you know view it more i think as as an economy there's a lot of incentive alignment on there and it's you know it's it's very different from communities elsewhere on the internet where it's obviously a lot of pvp and other social media and so obviously i'm biased but i think that you know that type of incentive alignment that we've seen so far with things like what phil's building obviously humpty and openrink in general you know put putting tokens you know aligning tokens with communities i think we're really early on to that one of the few experiments that i did just a few months ago was trying to see with the photography community specifically on farcaster if we could align a token with putting work out because obviously art in general is you know more individual focus at the start and you know could we take you know something like themes with the nature channel for example and really align artists in a way where we can also have a token that you know is that these two things are working together you know to to grow as a community and you know be rewarded for the value that artists bring so yeah ran an experiment with touchgrass used coinbase galleries and it was it was interesting you know i think that what you guys are doing obviously at cura there's you know gonna continue to be ways that we haven't thought about i mean it started with dgen and moxie obviously what phil's doing with with amp and a lot of other incentive alignment to make sure that artists who are contributing are being rewarded for those contributions and what we see last thing is like a lot of the photographers that i've met on farcaster you know some of them have upwards of 200 you know even upwards of 500,000 followers over on instagram but they spend a lot of time on farcaster because those incentives are aligned so maybe they're only getting 20 likes or 50 likes on farcaster but they're still spending more time there because it's you know it's directly benefiting them in a way that they're not getting on other social media so anyway those are just some some brief thoughts
yeah go ahead andre
yeah i just wanted to throw in another lens in here i i really love that most people here are working kinda creator centric ecosystems whereas i'm one of the nine moderators of the ethereum channel and it's a very different experience here we don't really it's kind of like more of a overflow sync for everything in many ways a lot of people wanna spam the channel a lot of people wanna like reach the audience that we didn't really earn we're just kind of given by default some like 300,000 as we were the default channel for a long time so it's kind of a different channel different challenges different kind of groups of of these communities for example the news communities the like politics communities they're not so much creator centric they're just more kind of like people need to get some stuff out and this is where they go it's kind of interesting to to see the kind of creative centric tooling and how the needs are different yeah i just wanted to kinda throw throw that out there
so the question was about tokens and their role with communities on firecaster
yeah do you see any interesting experiments or novel takes on this so far
so i'm fortunate to have a lot of conversation time with gloria we've actually hosted a four part miniseries covering open rank and what they're doing on farcaster and i brought to them even before a lot of the work that currently is available like live like dynamic leaderboards and channel tokens some of the context from what was happening on farcaster to them and some of the experiments that i think most of us if not all of us here are very familiar with are dgen as it launched as a token that was built around a community right a dgen channel which it was able to reward people from that community initially through an airdrop really for doing not much but over time it has evolved into a much more sophisticated reward mechanism for people who are creating valuable content again who makes that determination the person giving that tip there is no central authority saying this is valuable content and that is a very powerful way of rewarding people as a mechanism for engaging and incentivizing people for you know that type of activity that you find valuable on an open social graph like farcaster i think we've continued to see these experiments grow over time like ham i think for anybody in again in the farcaster community this is another example of how these token incentives can grow as you think about like defi as a way to extend the value of the token itself beyond as a you know token incentive to reward individuals that's a very complex system deployer obviously is a very intelligent person in the way that they have thought out the different ways that the token can be used and staked and you know reward people over time moxie was another good good good example of that obviously i think a little divisive because people were maybe spammed at one point for you know the creator tokens that were available the channel tokens i believe that were also or fan tokens as they cover everything the gamut of individuals and channels but it was just again another way of trying to create a system around rewards and obviously now biased here but one of the early channel token you know projects crypto sapiens we really don't have to do anything we worked with open rank to create a system by which the algorithm based on the engagement an individual has in our channel is automatically rewarded with this channel token so again it's it's a way to further decentralize the way that we reward individuals and the way that we can build communities in a decentralized way as well on farcaster through this open social graph that we've been gifted
thanks alexi so do you have a contrarian view or you agree with some of these points
i think a lot of good points to be honest i i don't know i haven't seen anything recently that's been super interesting to me a lot of the stuff seems really complicated and i don't have a ton of time to dig in i wish i had more time ownership is really tricky in a lot of places where people are it's not totally legal to do it in a way that we wanted to and hopefully that'll change soon but to me that's what i'm really excited about hopefully we can change some rules and regulations to make ownership actually possible because i think that's gonna be the big unlock
yeah
well thank you all i i want to kind of like just double click on some of the common points you all mentioned it seems like if we can figure out some mechanisms to align contribution with rewards we can potentially eliminate this problem that we've seen in the space that's basically any kind of rewards just attracts bots and mercenaries and basically farmers and you kind of include you know the the the original purpose of having this reward system so is it is it something that we can learn from some other early tokens like bitcoin or ethereum when they're you know building really long time on the left side of the curve rather than like having it you know quickly pumped and then dumped is that something that we need to also tweak when we think about like aligning timing aligning contribution when we reward people
i'm gonna start with andre yeah
i i think a
good example of gloria's even in i mean yeah we could go all the way back to to bitcoin and eth and obviously strong community alignment i'm sure andre will have some key talking points on ethereum itself i i'll just speak briefly on one that we see in farcaster itself with the higher community i think that they've done a incredible job with bringing unique talent together in the artist space and align around a meme and i get you know like that you know meme culture might be a little dicey right now especially from solana but like i think that you know when you when you bring together talent
in
a way and have people you know create art that's that's aligned with a meme and then own the token on top of it like i got you know i'm sure many of us in here got the higher airdrop as well last year and you know anyone can participate i think they call it you know just like martin says it all the time it's like there is no leadership there is no direction it's just anyone can contribute to the higher community anyone can you know create art that's higher aligned anyone can own the token and it just creates this like permissionless brand you know that that makes it so even you have outside companies i think i don't know if it was tldr or some someone maybe it was jacob from zuora like you know put the higher logo in the zuora slack channel and it's like that's you know just using a permissionless brand saying we are a part of this community too and i think there's there's a lot of power in that so that's with the token and artwork and you know community i think that's they've done an incredible job with that
yeah i think you gloria mentioned something about bitcoin and ethereum and you know developing this on the left side of the curve whatever that means you know what i what i what i wanna talk about is like what eric brought up in terms of culture and higher i think that's a perfect example of where we're at and actually where things always have been for a long time bitcoin as much as it is an important technological artifact you know whether you think of it as something that should be used as a transactional asset or something as a store of value there was a cultural shift in what bitcoin represented and for anybody who bought bitcoin maybe not everybody but for many including myself it was an alignment to those values of what bitcoin represented in the future that i wanted to see in the world and when i bought ethereum sadly not early enough but you know later later after i was in the crypto space for some time it was also a signal for the cultural revolution of what it represented of building on blockchain in a decentralized manner right so as these tokens have continued to evolve and represent different things at the end of the day there's a very strong cultural signal that they each hold and i think the ones that have outlasted many of what's much of what's happening on pumped out fun and solana are the ones that are establishing some cultural significance and a movement that can bring people together to act and to unite and do so together so i i think that's that's worthy of kinda like recognizing and both from a historical perspective but also you know with what's happening with crypto coins today
that's a really good point andre if so any thoughts
yeah i mean again i'm i'm gonna throw in a a little different perspective just just to kind of
introduce another conversation exactly yeah
i i i agree with both of you these are amazing kind of bootstrapping mechanisms and if we even look back at bitcoin and ethereum we have these incentive structures to how do we reward people how do we how do we earn these things bitcoin you do mining proof of work ethereum you you stake both of them when taken to an extreme was actually bad so like bitcoin when it was running up half a decade ago there was a lot of narrative how it's like boiling the oceans because using so much electricity and and arguably like yes and no like on on the one hand electricity much shouldn't be that as big of a deal but on the other hand it it was obviously not being very efficient and same thing with ethereum with proof of stake we created a very specific curve we don't want too many validators because what happens when we have too many validators the network gets overloaded the like peer to peer network it gets more expensive to be a validator so we want someone to decentralization so when thinking of these kinds of meme coins and like and these kinds of community coins these seem to be these amazing tools for bootstrapping kinda getting started i wonder if anyone has given a lot of thought for how what what do we do after we hit that when we have like a billion more users how is that gonna look different
feel you're in a position to answer that question
yeah i don't know i don't know if i have much to add i think these guys covered it really well i think you can't really control when the adoption will happen you just sort of have to keep your head down and build and be able to survive the draw downs because that's a natural part of crypto so it's hard
yeah it's it's really interesting why the conversation kind of like almost helped with segmenting like two kinds of problems one is if you could use tokenization to actually boost our communities and build a subculture and that seems to be really successful in crypto in general and bitcoin is one of these latest representation even you can argue is here in bitcoin actually did that as well as a sustaining subculture but at the same time you also want to reward true contributors and not to dilute a community in a sort of like more sustainable way and projects that can basically achieve the balance seem to do really well in a space but decoding there's you know secret recipe is probably the most important thing for us hamdi
yeah to the point of what andre said in terms of what happens when you have a billion users you know you gotta recognize that as ethereum enthusiasts users we have many interests so a billion of us on ethereum doesn't mean that a billion of us will be actively doing things that maybe the foundation thinks is important for us to do there are subcultures within subcultures right and i think one of the best example of this and i know a noun professor would be happy to hear this are nouns you know nouns do this in terms of like establishing who they are and who who what audience should be attracted to them and then they reward or fund subcultures within that organization so that that meme is propagated across a variety of groups who have different interests but are still aligned and have a shared vision so i think with ethereum just because i came and i i yeah i wanted to signal that i believed in building you know with decentralized rails doesn't mean that that's where my interests end beyond that there are interests in you know like i said values there are interests in creators and working with on chain media and because of that i navigate the gamut of platforms that are available on ethereum including base i use you know platforms like pods and hypersub which are much further downstream from ethereum so i think what happens when you have a billion users on ethereum well first of all you ensure that everyone who is actively contributing to the ethereum ecosystem like base like hypersub like farcaster are successful because a lot of them are going to be going to all of these different platforms to find their communities to build those communities and to find success themselves
yeah i just wanna quickly respond that's a really awesome point i really love nouns because they've kind of they've harnessed this thing as kind of something that makes positive externalities the more it gets bigger and i think that's amazing i'm more thinking of dgen and moxie and when i say a billion user users i don't mean a billion humans necessarily i mean like like like a billion ai agents that have learned really really well how to like farm the the dgen's and the the moxies why do we do that but yeah if the more we can build these kinds of tokens to have good externalities no matter how big they get i think that's super important
and i think just one other point excuse me one other point to bring up is i think i've been thinking a lot about farcaster and let's say farcaster does eventually get to a billion users for example or even a hundred million i think about how just like in real life you can have successful people in successful communities in various places around the world that have no idea that the others exist so like you know in in farcaster you could have a successful like we brought up higher we brought announce we brought up you know some other communities you could have a successful community that maybe stops it you know 50,000 people and it looks and i get that you know there's this comparison gets brought up often like cities states you know countries that type of thing within crypto but i do think there's a lot of just you know similarities between like you can have successful communities that don't grow to be a million people strong you could have a really successful community that's that's only a thousand people or a hundred people and have you know value still there so obviously there's going to be some communities that do grow to mass scale just like we see in you know traditional economies you have an amazon you have you know companies that grow to mass scale but there there can be successful people like you know i'm sitting here in milwaukee i'm sure there's a successful plumbing business right down the road that i've never heard of you know but they're doing great and i think there's gonna be a lot of comparisons in crypto in that way where you know as as the space scales overall we won't be able to know about everything that's happening in terms of like what is successful from a financial standpoint so
yeah that was the cozy corners thesis right from i i remember that being the big topic at farcon last may and we saw this with some of like the general interest channels that got really big they just weren't that interesting i mean it's sort of like food is such a broad topic it's actually pretty hard to have a group of people organize your own food but these smaller more niche channels tend to be the ones that have a lot more fervent supporters and you can be fooled by the top line number like hey that's a 50,000 followers but there might be a community of 1,500 people that's way more active and has a much stronger alignment between the community members inside of them that's been my big takeaway from the you know channels and especially running something like books which is just right at the edge of being too big of a category almost you know readers are a little bit weird and so sort of like we tend to accept other people but yeah it's pretty hard to have that big of a group and and find common interest
that's such a interesting point so we need communities of all sizes but not necessarily every size need to have a token to coordinate and build a community around so maybe the size also has something to do with that i think we're we're about to finish but i want everyone to maybe give one suggestion or one hot take you have for you know community entrepreneurs who are trying to build communities and potentially utilizing tokenization what will be your one suggestion or hot take
i'll go first i don't think airdrops work that well i just i really don't recommend it for most people it's sort of like i don't know what a great example is steroids or something like you get results quickly but the long term effects are pretty bad and i think a lot of people go for the airdrop because it's a great way to get results up front not have to do the work and then you're sort of left with a pretty bad cultural debt that you've incurred from a lot of people who have allocations that are mismatched with their long term ambitions to participate in the community and so i think you're probably better off doing it manually and giving out tokens by hand early on than you are trying to optimize for a market cap and give to as broad of an audience as possible there's obviously exceptions that make the rule but i think the fact that those have succeeded is in spite of doing a big airdrop not because of it so
great point eric you wanna go next or do you wanna go
sure not really a hot take but i think anyone that's new to to farcaster and i know gm farcaster has a bunch of new people that come and see what's you know this is a a way to learn about what's happening on farcaster i think just my only recommendation would be interact with people and try things like try their products you know try to create a channel try you know reply to people just be just just be active because it if you try to launch a token if you try to do something like most people aren't gonna remember that you even like let's say it fails like they they're just not gonna remember or quite frank like most people won't really care that much so like just just try anything and i think you know people on farcaster and i know we had ted and some others like on the previous panel everyone's really open here like everyone's open to having conversation open to ideas and you know i i just think that that's ultimately it's it's a big differentiator here versus on other socials so that'd be my only recommendation
thank you andre
hiya yeah i kinda wanna bring back to what others said i totally agree lots of small communities is gonna be extremely powerful and important especially as we get infinite number of agents one angle i've been thinking a lot about which is kind of a how to take is i think we need to focus a lot more on how cross pollination happens between different little communities i mean lots of small little group chats and we share links back and forth a lot but it's all very disorganized very haphazard and i think kinda cross pollination is gonna become increasingly really important in the future as we build more and more of these little communities so i'd love to see more kind of mindful design around that
hamdi is going to conclude the panel for me so i'm so glad you're the last one
i mean i've said it before i think just make sure that you have a clear set of values you know for yourself and for what you're building and define the mission who it is that you're wanting to connect with and and grow a community around and build there's nothing you can't really shortcut any of that you just really gotta put in the work and be very thoughtful from the beginning because otherwise even if you drop a token it doesn't really matter if you don't really have a defined set of values and a mission and you know people that you wanna target
great thank you so much guys i think there's there are a lot of like really good insights we probably will double down to expand after this conversation i know hamtia is actually hosting an event in denver further expanding some of these conversations unfortunately we don't have time to take more questions but i'll see you around down farcaster and we can keep the conversation live thank you bye thanks bye
and we will be putting these different panels out as recordings as well so more conversation can happen around that and gloria we're gonna transition now to panel three
right
so while we do that we're bringing up plants and ash money and java boo and nate nate get all the a's in there so welcome to all of you all and we're going to move into talking about for panel three why people stay and engage how to build channels people love so what i'd love mate we lost you i think you may need to reconnect your devices we'll bring it back up when you're back so what i'd love to do first is kind of go around and ask each of you what what channels are you curating creating building and what have you seen here's nate nate's back hold on so so just you know do a quick intro and then talk about the channel that you are working on and contributing to and just give us a brief overview of that and i'll start with plantscatwalk
sure pleasure to be on here hello everybody familiar faces name's plants i've been on farcaster for about a year and love channels specifically my background right degen turned wannabe builder and content creator so i'd like to think that i've matured coming through the nft pfp craze stuck around during the bear and then
i hope we've all matured since then let's hope right
please like 95% of the people i've met are still stuck on x in all of the i'm not sure we can curse on here but they're in the shitter's like you know like they're not coming over
by the way we are broadcasting this on twitter so just letting you know
well i mean i stand behind this to all of you know my fellow pfp friends this is where consumer crypto is happening and an example of it right to bring it full circle is channels and so for myself i'm building catwalk it's a very different take than a lot of people on here i went extremely niche like as niche as possible because i felt somewhat overwhelmed with all the possibilities when you join the app and so i figured let me learn my space by getting as niche as possible on my content and maybe there's a couple other creators out there so i used catwalk as a breeding ground to try all the fun buttons and has since turned into a community of random cat lovers who take their cats on walks around the world so super niche super great
i wasn't sure if it was gonna be people who take cats on a walk on a leash for a walk or if it was you're just really into fashion and you just like strut all the time like you know you're too sexy for this catwalk i i wasn't sure could have gone either way
yeah the google searches that i've been seeing if it pops up anywhere aren't very promising but no if you look at my videos we live stream our walks i am not one for fashion i am brutal
you know you could have been surprising it could have been a surprise you never know but i love that so how how are you finding in terms of like how do people are finding you it's just from posting and then all of a sudden they're like i also have a cat and i like to walk them on a leash i love that
it's i think it's just being so unique and different and being unapologetically authentic you know there's people on here that aren't cat people at all but they'll see another post and think of us and they'll tag me and then i'll bring that person into the community and again because it is so niche driven my issues are different than nature or i took a photo where people are going there for farming now we do have some of that because we'll talk about incentives i've used my personal tipping stuff to get better content build habits etcetera but i mean my issues are different there i just need quality content with people following the rules that's where cura comes in and some of their tools to try and get on topic right
yeah that's my issue
keep it on the topic i love that ashmoney let me go to you and if you do a quick intro and talk about which channels you're involved in in building
awesome thanks for for having me i've been on forecast i think for about two years now and the channel that i'm working on is called football or soccer for the americans
oh boy
that was quite a sensitive topic of
starting to start with fighting words do you realize that's one of our lightning round questions right when we do interviews for the first time with somebody on gm forecaster we ask that we just say soccer or football and and their answer is always telling if they're american or not it's really funny
so we yeah we definitely call it football and that's the name of the channel as well so it's just a space for people to kind of chat with other football fans share any any news or mostly it's making fun of each other to be honest a lot of the time after after the result usually we see a lot of people posting like after after the game ends and it's just a fun space where we kind of talk about football in general and also different clubs that we support and yeah it's been going i think for about a year now and it's just kind of been going from strength to strength we've looked at adding a token through cura we haven't quite found the right model yet so we we decided to to not go ahead with the token launch but we have also issued rewards through cura so every month we issue rewards the first month we issued digen second month we did moxie and i think we're probably gonna do higher next month so just kind of rotating through the different forecast ecosystem tokens but yeah that's the channel it's been growing well we're quite sick with who can join the channel so at the moment you need to get an invite we previously allowed anyone to join and it was just chaos
and then there were just people in there there were these people in there with their american football and ruined the whole thing
i get it chaos but yeah that's that's that's football you you can check it out and let us know what you think thanks
nate to you now what channels are you building developing involved with
too many channels the most recent channels i've been involved in is the loom or and luminess so inspired by the luminess token that ethernet launched so initially i felt the need to spin off a side channel called luminess separate from loom just that you could talk about the token or whatever but luminess is like building at the intersection of ai and on chain communities and then from there we've also like created other small like tiny channels around building like loom protocol where we're talking about and trying to build some agentic infrastructure and then another one that's just kinda starting lit the luminous institute of technology that we'll we'll see how that one goes so there's there's a lot of things i'm trying things
the luminous institute of technology i kinda love that that's lit it's lit yeah it just is it's lit i love it jababoo let me go to you what channels are you give us a quick little intro what channels are you creating working on modding etcetera
yeah so i am spending the vast majority of my time modding and then curating politics it's mostly united states politics but every
doing doing god's work
yeah yeah
every so often lord lord help you
post on there really i think the mission of the politics channel is to have a space that we can come break down silos i think what we're seeing is like twitter has become very heavily republican you're kind of getting a shift of people that are more democrat going to blue sky and kind of leaving and we're just like becoming more and more siloed and i am really hoping that at least on firecaster we can start building that community where we can have conversations of why do you support this policy why are you supporting this politician i don't support them for x reason and even if you can't find that common ground you can find the humanity behind all of that i'm actually pretty new to the crypto space i came in like the tail end of 2020 with all the nfts so i bought all your bags
thank you we have more
if you'd like to yeah
i'll just keep buying but came to the space i'm actually a former lobbyist i have been working in politics for a while and i just thought it would be really value valuable to have a space where we can actually have conversations about politics and not just kind of go into those hateful comments back and forth
like interesting and thoughtful conversation about politics yeah
yeah
yeah as opposed to just yelling at each other about politics yeah
i
love it
and then we've been doing monthly rewards as well i have a leader boards at the end of every month we have a tipped poliakos group that it's about 25 of the top casters get all of my tips for the next month and then we also have a nft that we give out weekly recom recognizing members that are upholding the values that we're trying to promote
i got one of those one week i guess i don't so i have a background in politics and i'm also an attorney and i basically turned off all my politics stuff for like a few years and i just slowly tiptoed back a few months ago so because other platforms were just too toxic to have any kind of just intelligent conversation so it's been nice to have that i'm still trying to manage it so i don't go overboard
but that was a really nice reward and recognition that i wasn't even aware of and i was like oh this is really cool thank you thank you for that that was very nice so that is a perfect segue and a couple of you have mentioned some rewards and things you're doing to sort of encourage and and reward your your good your good community members so this is one of the questions from the team community retention is tough in your experience what makes people stay engaged in a channel long term you and it says apart from usual rounds and meme coins but i'd say both things like any kind of rewards that you're building in but also what else do you find is useful humpty mentioned on the first panel that he uses rituals in his channel so things like that and i'll go back to plants slash catwalk
to kind of start us off and then we'll circle through
sure you know catwalk being a niche channel i think we have unique issues or problems or solutions for this one and so for us specifically the best way to have meaningful conversations is to spend the comment we're talking about walking cats this is more like a spectacle for when people come to our channel to watch it's like a reality tv show or a train wreck right this isn't coming here
to show
off the tv
this literally might turn into my new favorite show
i mean people don't know anything about it right and so the
way i
do it it's entertainment it's entertainment we always hear from dan more interesting content well not everyone likes cats but i can tell you what this is something that's interesting and unique and so for me it's about finding five seven anyone besides me that is willing to put content out there and share this very unique experience and so mine was all about are these people farming are they bs ing are they using ai i asked very specific questions that you only would know the answer to if you walk your cat or you take your cat outside and so for me yes rewards are nice but cat walking is a lonely experience i'm the only person in vegas i've ever seen do it i've traveled to almost every state in america i've only seen it happen twice and it was both in oregon right so like point being this is lonely and so the internet is a place for people to connect meaningful in-depth conversations about niche topic that's how we are able to succeed and build community then other people start watching and asking questions and it becomes a feeding frenzy in
a good way
alright everyone needs to go follow that watch channel right now because like i'm kind of excited that i've now learned about this channel very excited about it yes you will be seeing catwalk on gm farcaster very soon ash money how are you keeping members of your community engaged and what do you find is working well in that in regards to that
yeah on our side i think the the one learning that we picked up quite quickly was just issuing rewards is is not the best way to go about it so we kind of keep it a bit more random we don't really have a set structure in terms of how much rules we are issuing or when we are issuing the rewards so it's kinda random which makes it a bit harder to game the one thing that we found works really well is adding i don't wanna say utility adding games to the rewards so some of some of the rewards we do are based on predicting the outcome of a match score for example and those rewards we we kinda see do a lot better versus just kind of air dropping about it
seems like there would be some good synergy with bracket for
definitely to be doing the
at least you know as they as they expand and grow it would seem like that would be a good fit for maybe connecting
that would be awesome
yeah i see you've got some some fans in the chat they're throwing up they're throwing up the soccer balls i call them soccer balls love that nate how are you encouraging keeping people engaged in your channels
yeah i've i've definitely been heavily using contests the way i like think of contests is more of like a talent discovery mechanism or like a a a entryway into the community but long term i feel like people want to well different from different from cat walking obviously you know channels are different
i gotta say i didn't see the overlap of catwalk and football coming but there you go yeah there you go sorry go ahead
yeah at least for us i think people want to be a part of something that has a vision that kind of has a long term direction doesn't need to have like a concrete road map but something where you feel like this could become something right that long term grows and it expands and then i think there's also something about finding the place where people's interests meet their skills skill set so people have the skills to contribute and interest in contributing to the community because like one thing trying to encourage people to in the community to work on the protocol stuff or agentic infrastructure i feel like we don't have as much of a technical community so far so there hasn't been as much engagement there but it is which was my hope bringing in a few new people to the community so i think yeah where people have the skills to contribute and the interest to show up i think that's kind
of the
it seems like that particular channel would find a lot of just general interest even if people aren't just because they're curious about that intersection right now especially where you haven't have a new in the us a new czar who's specifically looking at crypto and ai so it makes a lot of sense there would be some interest there jababoo you mentioned already nft but how else are you keeping people engaged and also how are you keeping fist fights away from the channel
just curious
so i'll speak first about the nft so this is something that's relatively new we've been doing it for months but we launched a politicos nft so kind of going back into a few years ago or i guess last year with the var katz it's just cats dressed up as politicians so we send that out every single week and really just to recognize a member of the community and i think those types of recognitions even if there's if you get that nft you get added to a djm microsoft list where
you get like i think
it's like 5¢ every three days or something it's not that much but i was seeing that just kind of the personal recognition i pinned that to the kind of main chat everyone kind of welcomes them into that to the family and just kind of recognizing people i think has driven that community and had more buying overall i will say that we also have some great mods that i've been working with for the past year since we launched this this channel that really uphold that value and we have conversations about members and we do bang people from the politics channel it's usually people that are just kinda spamming the channel but sometimes we have had to bang other members if they weren't upholding the values that we're looking for and i think the last thing that we have is a soul bound membership nft so you actually have to pay it's about $10 to join the politics channel and i think having that small kind of buying of saying i do want to participate i'm willing to pay x amount has kind of helped us generate that community that we're looking for
yeah that definitely creating maybe little barriers not huge ones but if you're trying to curate a community that can be really helpful to at least keeping out you know just straight up farmer spammer kind of thing by the way yeah the cat ai bought cats dressed up in political suits playing football there we go i mean somebody somebody build i wanted to double click on something you said about recognition because i think that i don't wanna overlook that because i think that's more important than people realize that a lot of times it's not something monetary or tangible it's more just the recognition of oh hey you see me and appreciate what i'm contributing here can be really important and we've seen that with when we shout out people for gm farcaster we thought it was gonna be we thought people were gonna like we weren't sure how people were gonna take that like if they were you know feeling like it was spammy or what but overall like we never have anybody like everyone's really appreciative of it when we just shout them out and just say hey we showed your cast on our show today and they're like wow they just feel good that they've been seen so i like that you know idea of just even shouting out your community members you know we do the same thing with those who are in our chat every day and it takes a little bit of extra work but it's worth it to be like hey i appreciate that you show up for us and we wanna make sure that that you know that i think that is you know under underappreciated so it's something as simple as that can be super helpful we've got a couple more questions but i'm going to hone in on one more because we're running short on time what in your experience can make a channel feel more like home rather than just another feed so i guess that kind of relates to what we just talked about it's like how do you get people coming back every day to sort of contribute to that channel and is there anything any suggestions you may have for that or anything that you've seen that doesn't work that you tried and you're like well that really didn't work because sometimes that's the best learning we can have for sure and i'll leave that open to whoever wants to jump in first
i'll jump in first here for me it's it's about remember people are sharing basically part of their family members right so they're exposing they're opening up their heart they're sharing something they love and so the most important thing at least from my experience is remembering a detail about either the cat's name where they're from if it reminds you of another person oh you're also from iran we have a bunch of people from iran in our community here's some other people right just introducing each other that was really big because you're basically saying hey like i think this other person's community would enjoy this it's just connecting to other strangers and i'm the intermediary so it's making people feel comfortable by remembering something specific about their family member and specifically as we go forward the way i envision this is because all these casts are on chain eventually i would like to have a historian for my channel it be a bot it remembers everyone's cats names where they're from it encourages the rules of engagement in the channel as well and plays like kind of moderator so we don't have to but mainly it makes people feel comfortable and remembered that's the most important
i love that and we've we've adrian just developed a gm farcaster bot and and that was one of the parts of it was just to like be a historian if you will and be the thing that we can go hey did we ever talk about this at all and pull those those episodes and give us links to it and it could be very similar like hey did we ever have a cat that was x y z that would be yeah that would be a cool thing to have in there ash money you wanna go next like what what have you found has worked any experiments that you've done that haven't how do you create it as a home that people wanna come back to every day
yeah what has what has worked for us is we make the members feel like they're part of the decision making process of the channel so before we launched the cura leaderboard we had a a proposal where channel members could vote on whether we should launch it or not we did the same with the the channel nft and we actually did the same with the token and we've seen that doing those kind of proposals even though it's not like a technical dao it kind of creates that buy in from the community so that's one thing that has worked really well another thing that has worked well is sharing more real stories so we had afro chicks her brother is a football player and he did a kind of like a community call so that was really cool you've you've got people going to games somebody went to a game i think in seattle this week where it was like freezing and had a picture of them at the game so bringing those kind of real stories into the channel also helps a lot just to step away from all the kind of test talk and kind of banter so yeah those two things would be my
i think you kinda let you you kinda mentioned the ama and that to me is a great way to build like building like these little mini events in your channel and they can be as simple as an ama that's happening in your channel it could be all text it can be video whatever but i think that is a is a great approach too for certain channels you know it's not gonna work for everything but i think that's great i love what you said about buy in from the channel members i think that is always fantastic that makes it feel more like a community and coming from the world of dows that's not always easy but it is it's definitely a great way to do and we have a lot of tools that are already built into farcaster and frames and things like that you can use ponder as something as simple as simple as that or there's other you know i think it's god is it voc doc something like that that has like a voting tool so there's there's a lot of tools that are already built out within the farcaster ecosystem for that approach nate how about you what else how do you make it feel like home and what kinda experiments maybe that haven't worked or worked for you
yeah i think i think maybe home isn't the right analogy for me but but places of belonging places of contribution places where you can meaningfully participate and feel like your participation is valued is kind of and and so i think that there's been a balance like a balance of providing vision and then having early people be able to like shape the vision and directly direction of being part of it because nobody shows up if there's no like vision or direction to start with but also allowing a lot of input to shape the vision and then i think there's also this balance of being a closed and open community where so like or or and also public private how much is like private in group chats and how much is public on the feed i think my initial mistake is i was trying to make everything public like everything is but but you know people don't wanna like say they wanna like hey you know some people don't wanna just put everything out there in public but you know avoiding like any sort of backroom chatter about whatever but but to allow some some closed private spaces and then like welcoming like allowing welcome to new people even if they don't quite know the the culture or the the community yet you know they're just here for the contest to still be open to engaging with our participation so that's kind of some thoughts yeah
yep love that and and there was something you just said and now i just lost it that i was gonna comment on there's like there's in terms of the what you're doing oh i know what it was group chats can be another aspect of this where you can tie together especially if your channel has a token or has some kind of gating to it you can build that into a group chat to where if you wanted something that felt a little more private that would definitely be a possibility to connect it with your channel as well and java boo how about for you in terms of how are you making it in in this may not be the same for politics but making it feel like home or making it feel like maybe for you it might be making it feel like a comfortable place especially where people might feel scared to wander into the politics channel
yeah i think overall like when i first launched politics i was trying to grow it as fast as possible we had to come you could easily join we were trying just to add as many members as kind of to kind of get that conversation going and i think i've shifted that thinking to being like if we don't add a new member for weeks that's completely fine like if we are right now we have a good core group but there's probably about a hundred to 200 of us that comment and have discussions every every day every week and i am fully comfortable with that and we have more and more people kind of joining the channel just as they're not able to cast in the channel but they're able to view the the channel and that continues to grow so it's showing that we're having conversations that people are viewing but i think slow growth is now kind of where my focus is is on like we have really good members i wanna support those members and if we slowly add more and more that's great but i don't need to have 10,000 people talking about politics
if we just call that twitter yeah
we just
call that twitter yeah
i do wanna pull a couple things from the chat in here really quick as we finish up whoops there was a comment about ai agents rather than bots and actually that's what i meant i think i used the word bot but i actually meant an ai agent so like what adrian had developed for gm forecaster is actually an ai agent so it's a little it's definitely different and then there's also a comment in here about to be honest nothing will gather and hold people in a channel except rewards i disagree and so do some people in the chat so rewards can help but it may not be the only factor and also rewards
if it's done well i agree it can be a way to really help keep those who are engaging engaged but it doesn't necessarily lead to quality so that's the one thing you have to just keep in mind and sometimes you need to tweak those things to figure out that right balance that makes sense like i think some of you all have have experimented and talked about that and then figuring figuring out what is the way to do rewards that make sense for those who are contributing especially organically and who are really adding to the conversation and the importance of the channel so yeah i agree i agree that you got to figure out the farmer part of this and make sure it doesn't distract from why you created the channel in the first place like i'm assuming that you don't create a catwalk channel for monetary gain but maybe you do i don't
know you
can get enough people and they all stream it might be an interesting thing
but
i think there's actually probably a really good possibility there
very fantastic we are going to wrap here this has been so much fun it's been great to get to know you all go follow all these amazing channels that we've been talking about today we're going to be back tomorrow at the same time with three more panels so we'll be hearing from other channel owners creators who are doing the work and take some more questions then as well so anything else that you guys want to shout out really quick as we wrap this up are we good all right thank you all it's been fantastic and thanks everybody for popping in and we will see you tomorrow and with that bye bye