Channels and Communities
Aired Date
November 27, 2024
Hosts
Series
Farcaster 101
Episode
Module 12
Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDmUCO1VTk4farcaster 101 is an educational series brought to you by gm farcaster in partnership with snickerdoodle building off of their state of farcaster report which you can access at snickerdoodle.com this 12 part series introduces all aspects of the farcaster ecosystem and helps you get started building your social graph and brand on farcaster
we're back gm parcaster this is the last module module 12 and we're covering channels and communities and i'm really excited so adrienne we are at the end here and we are just have a little bit left we're gonna talk about channels
this is the best topic
communities and how to create communities on barcaster
so go ahead and use it no it's just the best topic to end with because
farfaster is about community and we we touched a lot in this in the culture modules about the url to irl connections and and kind of how but at the end of the day people are finding a lot of value in farcaster because they're able to create community connect with people learn from each other so it's a it's a great module topic to end on
awesome so for this one we are going to talk about channels and community we're gonna cover types of channels again and just kinda do a quick review of that channels as communities and some channels to follow that we really love and how we think they add to our ecosystem so as we mentioned types of channels we have some that are more like hashtags they still they're public channels they act sort of as a signal of where you want to cast this and they also provide a great place to find information on a particular topic so for example some of the larger channels that fall into that category are the farcaster channel and the warp cast channel and we'll talk more about some of these examples as well then we have sort of brand channels that are a little more announcement focused and communities so we're going to dive into each one of these so public channels let me start here are channels that are set to everyone in the moderation and they allow anyone to cast and reply so if you look at who can cast if you are a moderator of a channel or an owner of a channel you'll see this option where you can change it to everyone or members only and then set up some moderation around that so some public channels like the farcaster channel and the warp cast channel are set to public and there are quite a few others as well and i believe this is where it's defaulting to now if you start a new channel which we showed you in the last module how to create 1 you will automatically set to everyone and then you can change it to a different type of moderation
and adrienne can you talk about brand channels and how brands are using channels as part of their strategy
we just see a lot of brands will come in and create a brand account the good brands also have good intern accounts as we've talked about in former modules and earlier modules but we also recommend that brands create a channel it's like a think about it as like a home base for your brand or almost like your booth in an expo if you're at a conference it's like your place as a brand so lots of examples base has one and it really is a place that the brand itself can control in terms of announcements but the best ones are also using it to create community as well so it's a place for the customers or users of the brand or people who love the brand to come and and either talk with the brand or talk with other kind of fans of of the brand as well so base is not just for the core base team to post but anyone building on base will can come and ask questions rainbow i think has a channel where people who are using the rainbow wallet will come in you can and and and give product feedback or bug reports so it's almost like just think of it as like a corner in farcaster where you can connect directly with your users so it's definitely recommended when you come into farcaster as a brand you should spin up a channel and and use it to to do a lot of your your brand work
absolutely and you can use it as i mentioned like rainbow as a customer service portal as well so i would definitely say that creating a channel is better than creating a discord at this point for your for your brand you might want both for different reasons especially if you have some sort of complex things going on with your with your particular brand but having a channel gives you this public face that anyone can find but also you can manage who can post in there as well so it could be just that the brand is is casting or it can be that anyone is casting within that channel but also being able to find each other in relation to that brand
yeah the brands that that do the customer support really well too will do kind of like a public customer support and the ones that do it well will sometimes have other other fans answering questions like community answering questions for community so an example of this is there's a nayanar channel nayanar is a forecaster infrastructure company we've mentioned them a few times in these modules they have a channel there is customer support that you can access directly through through email and telegram and get 1 on 1 support but if you're having problems with or challenges developing something on nayanar and you post in the nayanar channel very often you will get an answer from just another user and who will answer so it's just kind of that that public help and i did that yesterday and i it was very helpful
love it and yeah it can it can really create a quicker feedback loop as well so if you have other users who can answer that question and they're willing to do so it definitely helps to move things along without having to wait especially since a lot of at least the web 3 teams can be fairly small you might have teams that are 1 or 2 folks and you're using something and you need a quick answer and sometimes it's easier to get that answer from other users so great great unlock there for brands and then we have channels as communities and there's sort of 2 different types there's the community that exists elsewhere that comes on to warpcast and creates a presence there via a channel an example of that is nouns so nouns such as a dao which a lot of folks know within web 3 sort of made a decision decentralized decision to sort of move the conversation over to warpcast and have that be sort of a home base for discussions around proposals and what's happening within the dao so a little different approach than a lot of other daos that are primarily using things like telegram or discord and making it much more public so that the larger nouns community not just the holders can access and participate and you have communities that have developed via warpcast and farcaster and hire is a great example of this so hire was is this is a token as well as a community and sort of a vibe if you will so it's a it's a little bit of everything and sort of at its core it's a headless brand so the community itself is what's building the brand and the vibe and this is all happening within the haier channel on webcast so that's where it primarily exists and where folks within that community find each other and find information about what's happening with it with haier and from all different aspects whether it's the token the art or other aspects of the community people building on top of that brand burr friends is another one which actually started kind of a fun way burberry on warp cast and farcaster is a was a professional poker player and i think she's retired but started a poker club for fun within the farcaster ecosystem and then didn't launch a channel at first and one of the community members launched a channel for that community because they wanted just more of a space to be able to talk about what was happening with the games and things like that and sort of you know stoke the rivalries and all those kind of fun things so this is a another fun use case for communities within farcaster what else should folks know about building community within channels adrienne
i just say there's like an infinite i think number of communities that could be built on farcaster so other just other examples there are location based ones so there's kind of city channels for you to connect with local people there are it's almost like there's a there's a community for anyone out there and then if if not you can go start your own from a forecast or technology perspective not not not much else to cover that we haven't already talked about everything you've ever heard about building a community though also applies in farcaster so building strong community is not easy work so it's the really good communities i think are following all of the kind of the best community building practices which is which can be slow and methodical which is why i think we we showed this in the last module why there's so many channels that don't have activity and so many communities that don't get built but yeah i don't know i i think that's all i would add
alright and then we sorta have these topic channels so we have channels that are developed around a particular topic they provide an opportunity for folks to come together to talk about that topic to share things about that to ask questions and here are some of our favorites the food channel which is always you know it's your typical share share your dish with what did you just make this today or it can be sharing recommendations about different restaurants or it can be sharing recipes different types of things we've also seen galazio who has shared actual cooking demos within the food channel as well as her own channel called galazio's kitchen or i think galazio is the channel but galazio's kitchen is her is her videos and then we have things like the art channel which covers all different types of art and that one is a public and a public facing one books channel which also hosts amas with authors and phil's been who manages that channel has been great about gathering different types of authors bringing them into that channel to answer questions and then the parenting channel which is a lot of fun especially for the new parents finding help with the new ones and asking questions and having different community members answer questions about you know whatever whatever parenting topic that is or just having general discussions so these are a lot of fun and then we have some that kinda dig down a little bit more adrienne can you talk about some of these channels around topic channels and events as well
sure so just continuing on we've got silicon valley daily which is slash s v d this was a channel that farcaster founder dan romero started i think as a experiment in creating better content on farcaster where he's really just posting daily tech news
into farcaster
and that's a a relatively new one but has has has good content there the founders channel is massively popular and this is because there are so many founders on farcaster so as you can see i'm still here with
one of my favorite channels for for two reasons one it's like it's like having your own little advisory board if you're a start up without having to actually have an advisory board
meaning you could ask questions so like if you are a founder and you are struggling or yeah like you can post questions to this channel and other founders will answer
yeah it's fantastic and then also this is another channel that's had some great amas and we've had so you know vitalik has done an ama brian armstrong gary tan from y combinator so there's been a lot of pretty amazing folks within the crypto space who've done some amas in their channel as well
yeah and then there are farcon channels which is event specific we've seen we've seen ethdenver ones we've seen devcon channels so there's a channel called farcon nyc this is for the farcaster user conference that is going to be is in the works right now it's planned for may 2025 so channels like that will spin up i don't expect this channel to be very active in years from now but these are kind of the these temporal channels that pop up for specific events as they come up which is like a place to to gather for certain events we've seen also kind of events throughout the past year that have popped up with channels like debate channels when there were debates during the presidential election this year i there was a boxing channel that came up during a famous mike tyson jake paul boxing event what else what other during
all the different sporting events like super bowl and world series when whenever there's a big sporting event moment there's usually gonna be either if there isn't an existing channel then someone will create one for that moment and that's been a lot of fun as well to kinda drive that engagement into one space so people can find each other who are experiencing that same event at the same time
and you may be asking why not a hashtag then
should we be asking why not a hashtag why not a hashtag adrienne
forecaster is very opinionated about hashtags so people come from other social networks and can't figure out why we don't have hashtags the reason that is is hashtags the cost of creating a hashtag is 0 and you get no additional tools so as soon as you create a hashtag that becomes has any amount of popularity it tends to get spammed and the quality of content goes down people interject because they want attention so hashtags have never been on farcaster they never will the the opinionated design decision was that you're paying to create channels because that adds a little bit the the right amount of friction and and it's showing your intent is there but then you also get all these moderation tools so that you can kinda control for who is allowed to to post and cast so so if someone comes in and tries to spam your channel you can kick them out and and that was a decision i think that dan made early on and has stuck with and i think has proven to be be really good because the it it it helps improve the quality of
yeah definitely
of content within channels
i think that a lot of the decisions within channels that we're talking about is a lot of that is around how do we manage spam how do we manage how do we you know help to create quality content and make it engaging and a lot of these decisions are evolve around that and i think that a lot of it's still experimentation and trying to figure out what works best so you'll see when you know recently channels changed a little bit and there's been this sort of adjustment period where okay that worked oh that didn't work and then try sort of making those adjustments and that's you know the nature of a brand new social network yeah so yeah that does happen
and that comes up a lot are these kind of design decisions decisions based on various trade offs and a lot of people especially in the crypto space just really want to push for decentralization and and just freedom right any sort of constraint on anybody can be seen as a insult to their existence and it's like you know are we the or do we stand for free speech or not so if you you start to see kind of what appears as constraints or restrictions on speech
there has been time where people get upset about it however you have to look at the trade off because if there are no constraints you end up with slop like at work right slop and and and also just some some really bad things
and also there's a channel for slop
yeah i'm sure
there is a slop channel
and generally what we found is people don't want a social network that is full of
slop and spam
yeah slop and spam
yeah i think it's the trade off on time right so one of the things that dan the founder of one of the founders of farcaster has mentioned a few times is the tax on time and when you have a lot of spam and a lot of slop it's a tax on your time trying to sort through to find the good stuff so a lot of these tools and approach have been around that thinking of like how do we make sure that the quality users who love it here can do so continue to cast great content without having to to sort of go through the slop to get there great
one more thing that we want to talk about is channels and rounds so rounds wtf is a site that you can go and check out all the different rounds that are happening within farcaster a round is a way for a community person channel what have you to distribute a grant to folks who are posting the good content under particular requirements so what i'm what i mean by that is for example base builds holds rounds that if you've built something on base you can post what it was that you built that week and you will receive a portion of a set amount of a grant say it's 2 eth for that week you'll receive a portion of that based on the number of likes that your cast gets in that channel during that round so if you have a channel you can go to rounds.wtf and set up a round to happen within your channel that you own and set up the amount of grant whatever that is it can be eth it could be degen it could be higher all different tokens are allowable on there and you set the requirements for that particular round what you want to see what any other requirements for participating that might be there you can also within the rounds interface on rounds wtf you can you can disqualify essentially certain casts that maybe don't fit the requirements and make sure that your round is hitting the points that you want it to hit so some other channels that have some really great rounds are the nouns animators channel so it's for animation involving the nouns art and even the nouns channel itself has some really good rounds for posting quality content in there but anyone can use this tool it's been built by the nouns community but it is integrated into farcaster into warpcast i should say and any channel owner can use this tool to do a grant program and to encourage great content in their channel and i think that's it for rounds and that is it for our whole farcaster 101 series so adrienne why don't you do a little wrap up of what we've covered in this series of 12 modules
yeah first of all congratulations to you for making it through all 12 modules hopefully you are equipped to be very successful on farcaster understanding all the little quirks and what makes farcaster unique just to recap of the 12 modules module 1 and 2 we covered an intro to farcaster and how to create your account modules 34 we did everything about frames what they are how to use them how to create them yourself modules 56 was all about forecasters' culture and vibes and what makes forecaster culture unique modules 7 and 8 were all about cryptocurrencies and meme coins which was very topical because 'tis the season of meme coins these days especially on base shout out modules 9 and 10 was all about content creation and different strategies for how to create your first 100 casts and build good content on farcaster and we just finished up with modules 11 and 12 all about channels and creating community so that is everything you get for a farcaster 101 which is really just touching the surface and the basics of farcaster
but hopefully you found this valuable and and we're really excited to welcome new people to farcaster the future
of yeah and the best way to stay up to date from this point forward is to join us on gm farcaster and we stream live generally speaking monday wednesday and friday usually at 8:30 am eastern but we replay the stream as well as provide a recording so you can stay up to date on all the things and you can find that recording anywhere you get your podcasts and that will help you stay up because it is an ever changing environment it i guarantee you literally by the end of this week something will be out of date in everything that we just did so that's just the nature again of a of a startup and things always changing but that's also what makes it so exciting and so fun to be on farcaster so that's it anything else adrienne
really really it's just fun it's so fun it's fun we love it no i think that's
it so thank you for your help thanks everybody
we'll see you on the timeline
we'll see you on the timeline tag us say hi and with that we say bye bye