Channels

caster gm far caster welcome back to far caster 101 and you are here with nanoshrop and adrienne and we're gonna be talking about channels today so adrienne what is a channel on farcaster

perfect and so in this next part of our series we are going to be chatting about channels so we're gonna talk about what are channels moderation in channels how to cast in channels and also how to create a channel yes you can create your own a little something to start us off from the state of farcaster report from snickerdoodle and this is a quote from sandy forward the head of growth at poap what excites me about farcaster is channels i see incredible potential in these becoming modular components for on chain still that can be integrated or alternatively actual anchor points for communities to connect and socialize and this kind of i think is a great way to summarize how i see channels as well they are many things in one but the big unlock to me is for communities to connect and socialize i think that is key adrienne can you talk a little bit about this chart from the dune analytics around channels on farcaster

yeah yeah you can bring your group chat to the timeline if you want and keep it nation we'll talk about moderating channels and and how you can do that so a little bit about sort of the anatomy of a channel we have sort of on the left hand side when you're looking at your your timeline you'll see a list of channels and we'll talk a little more about that in a as well but that's how you can navigate to some of these channels and then once you're in there you have sort of your typical social style social media style with a banner image a logo that you can add to your channel the name of your channel a description you can also add a link to something in this case for gm forecaster we have a link to our youtube channel so you can watch all of our amazing content and also you'll see members versus following how many people are following versus how many are members if it is your channel you'll be able to invite other folks to become members of that channel so that's what the invite is and adrienne can you talk a little bit about the difference between members and followers of a channel

great and then what you're also seeing on here is the manage channels navigation so you can edit the channel profile manage the members and that includes inviting by you can just type in the broadcaster username to invite somebody you also have an area where you might have your banned users if you've banned anybody from your channel from posting in there they'll show up there you also have things like rituals which is you can you can type in there something that'll post every single certain amount of time like once a week once a day things like that who can cast that's where you can moderate and note who who can cast in the channel and then you can also change the owner in other words you could sell your channel to somebody else or give it away not sell it but give it away let me rephrase that yeah you could sell it you could sell it but but maybe maybe not technically you do not own the channel per se you're essentially renting it from warp cast and from the merkle team so you can you have limited limited rights there under the terms of services so adrianne how do we cast in a channel can you give us a demo of that

know if you wanna cast that one and the oolly posting

and now you see the tag there as well so you see the tag next to where adrienne's name is that shows that she had casted it in uli posting if you click on that it will bring you to that channel so if you see something in your feed with a channel tag click on that tag it'll bring you to the channel and you can check out everything else that's in there and see if anyone's getting banned for using the letter e in the only posting channel great alright adrienne can you talk a little bit about how to find channels a couple different ways between search and navigation

cruise through and see which one cruise through and as

i can recall that one that had that had her that had a reason for being at one point so moving on we're going to it within the mobile app there is a slight difference in terms of being able to navigate to channels it still has the same navigation on the left hand side with your favorites as well as recents and all of the ones that you're following but also the the tabs can be seen at the top as well so if you take a look at this this will show you the different tabs at the top of your app that allow you to navigate as well to the different channels so you'll see following trending and then the different channels that i am that i have as favorites so farcaster far castles nouns builder gm farcaster etcetera and it allows for quicker navigation through

okay moving on adrianne how do we create a channel

and that's also where you'll find in that manage is where you can invite people to your channel as well and you can add description you can add a logo you can add a banner and as well as a link to if you have an outside place that you'd like to link back to

and adrianne can you show on who can cast how we can make this public

so just invite me first

and then you can also invite folks to be moderators as well so members or moderators to your channel who can then have

go to manage and then just show they click on who can cast and just show so right now it's set to everyone so anyone can cast and reply in this channel right now if you switched it to members only then it would only be those who have been invited that could cast in the channel so it gives you a little bit of flexibility as to your approach to a channel so for example we mentioned the group chat as a channel so a public sort of group chat where you might have just a handful of members and those are the only ones who can post in there or you might have something that anyone can post in so that's our cast in so that's a different way to approach different types of channels

alright awesome so we've created our channel we now want to understand how to moderate a channel so one option if you want to limit who can join the channel but not have to invite every single person there's different moderating tools that can help you do that and one of those is modbot and if you go to slash modbot or i think also at modbot you'll be able to find some information about that just search modbot in the search bar and you will find this and this gives you a little bit of this little bit of a video that shows the different ways that you can navigate through the moderation on modbot it shows you first the different channels that you have that's what's back here and then you select which channel on this case i selected cast out so i could make a a change as to who can join the channel you can leave it as recommended and what this will do is just limit hopefully the spam from hitting your channel feed or you can make it custom which means you have different rules that you can set to decide who can be invited but first you do have to invite modbot to be one of the moderators in order to set this up to let make sure it works properly so you go to settings invite modbot to be one of your moderators oops come on show the rest of the video there we go and once you do that you will have another screen where you can set up where you're how you're going to set the rules as to who can be a member in the channel so one of the cool things with modbot and similar moderation tools there are some from air stack as well is that you are able to make different rules for who can be a member including if they hold a certain nft if they hold certain erc 20s if they have a through airstack you can do fan tokens from moxie so there's a whole bunch of different options as to who can cast in the channel you can also add some cast rules and other types of settings like collaboration and other tools and activities

so lots of flexibility there especially around it so for example if you have an existing community such as a dao and you want to set up a channel for them and maybe use that in place of discord or telegram this is a great option you can set it so that only the members who hold the dao token can cast a top level cast but anyone can also reply so it makes for to it doesn't limit the participation but it also controls the spam

you waiting for so we have different types of channels and we're gonna get into this a little more in our next module which we're we're you're gonna be rolling right into in just a moment so channels sort of started as a means of distribution as a way of tagging like we mentioned similar to hashtags where you would get greater distribution if you had casted in a channel they've now shifted gears and we have some that still act in that manner those are the public channels so they can still act as a tag because anyone can cast in them we also have brand channels where brands are sort of managing their communities or their brand within the channel maybe using that more as announcement sort of focus i think you know gm farcaster is actually a good example of this we primarily use gm farcaster to keep you informed about what we're doing in terms of streams and recordings and then you have the community channels and some like we mentioned are existing communities that came on to farcaster and others are communities that sort of evolved from farcaster and we'll talk more about that in our next module adrienne before we shift over to that anything else that we missed in terms of the basics for channels

awesome alright and we're going to head into our last module and we'll see you in module 12 where we talk about channels and community