Farcaster is new-ish social network built on the Ethereum blockchain. I joined in November 2022 and instantly became a daily active user. Most people I talk to have never heard of it. I am writing this post to share my personal experience, explain why I think it’s a special place, and invite you to check it out.
How it started
Before I ever heard about Farcaster, I was very active on Twitter. The 3 main reasons I loved Twitter:
Discovery & learning. It was by far the best place to learn about my favorite topics: tech, enterprise software, DevOps, crypto, AI, investing, wellness, mindfulness, science.
Clarified & improved my thinking. The more I tweeted about my own personal and professional journey the better my thoughts evolved and took shape. Regurgitating things I was learning about helped me understand topics even deeper.
Journaling and bookmarks. I loved having a written archive of things I had found interesting in the past; I used my twitter feed as an external hard drive or an old journal to refer back to.
But 2022 was the year when Twitter stopped being so valuable to me. It was the year Elon purchased Twitter for $44B and in the 6 months before the deal closed, it was utter chaos. I was no longer discovering interesting or useful content. Instead, my feed became entirely filled with people complaining about Elon and announcing they were leaving Twitter for any number of different platforms. Mastodon was most popular among my tech network.
I loved Twitter and I’ve always been a big Elon fan so I stuck around hoping the drama would subside and my experience would improve. But because I wasn’t getting value from the platform, I was open to finding an alternative.
Crypto Curious
Earlier in 2022 I had left my corporate job, a company I had worked at for more than 10 years and decided to give myself a few months to explore options. During this time, I took a web3 full stack dev course to more deeply understand crypto, a topic I had been curious about and exploring on the side. The course opened up my eyes even further to the benefits and promises that blockchain networks can bring, and during this time I started hearing about several twitter alternatives that were being built on top of decentralized technologies. I remember seeing mentions of Lens, Bluesky and Farcaster on my twitter feed.
There wasn’t a ton of information comparing the different options but someone I respect tweeted about Farcaster and it was enough to get me to try it.
Farcaster Onboarding - By Invite Only
Farcaster was still in beta at the time. To get an invite code you had to DM Farcaster founder Dan Romero on Twitter with a “link to something you built”. (Note: this is important! I'll come back to this later). I felt like an imposter asking for an invite because I hadn't built a crypto app or didn't have deep crypto credentials, but I put together my plea and he sent me an invite.
Farcaster Was Not in the App Store
To get onboarded back then you had to download the app through TestFlight (Note: more on this later too). TestFlight is Apple’s app that lets developers distribute beta versions of their apps to early users to test them out, before the apps are available in the app store to the general public.
I never used TestFlight before, so I had to first install Test Flight, and then I installed the Farcaster beta app through TestFlight.
Once the Farcaster beta app was installed, I used it to create a new account on Farcaster which involved spinning up a new Ethereum wallet. I got my seed phrase, wrote it on a piece of paper, and stored it away safely. The onboarding wasn't difficult for me at all because I had experience with other crypto apps but for the normal web user, it would have been really confusing. (Note: by the time you are reading this, the Farcaster onboarding experience does not require any crypto knowledge and you can register and onboard as easily as social networks you're already familiar with).
Once in Farcaster, it felt just like Twitter, so I knew what to do. I started casting (Farcaster's equivalent to tweeting or posting). I replied to people. The names of the people I first remember interacting with were: Cameron, Samantha, Ted, Les, Kazi, DWR, Polluterofminds, tldr, Ivy. All people who are still very active today.
What Made Farcaster So Special
I was hooked. I kept coming back, day after day, scrolling the feed, casting, replying.
I've thought a lot about what exactly I found so special about Farcaster, and how and why I kept coming back and it comes down to 4 main reasons: 1.) builder vibe, 2.) people act like humans, 3.) URL to IRL pipeline, 4.) it's not dull.
1. BUILDER VIBE
More than anything I kept coming back to Farcaster because the people were interesting. I didn't know a single person on Farcaster before I joined. And when I first came in, it seemed like everyone knew each other – like a tight knit circle of friends, and I was on the outside. But I realized pretty quickly it wasn’t the case – most people had only met in Farcaster and didn’t know each other before. I’m a natural pattern finder and I tried hard to find the pattern to figure out who these people were and what they had in common. Did they all work in crypto? Were they all developers? Designers? Founders? Investors? Were they all Silicon Valley based? Were they all in their 20s, 30s, 40s? I tried to map them to existing communities I knew of elsewhere. It broke my brain because I couldn’t find a common denominator.
Then it hit me. Everyone identified as a builder.
A builder creates something that wouldn't exist in this world but for them and their effort. Whether it's software, an app, a website, a company, a brand, a blog, a poem, a meal, a photograph, a painting, a family. True builders are inherently positive sum people. There was no one in Farcaster who was looking to extract value from someone else, they were all creating something new.
What bound people together was a value system. Farcaster users didn’t vibe together because of who we were or what we do, but rather how we saw the world. Builders are optimists. Builders are generous. Builders are confident and not threatened by scarcity or others.
The amazing builder vibes was not by accident. Remember Dan's requirement to get an invite into Farcaster was to tell him what you were building. I give Dan a ton of credit for seeding the early culture with this requirement.
2. PEOPLE ACT LIKE HUMANS
Around the time I onboarded to Farcaster my mom was diagnosed with Pancreas cancer. It was out of the blue. She passed away within 4 months of her diagnosis. It was a brutal time for me. I was driving back and forth from NY to PA several times a week. I was in crisis mode trying to understand the disease and figuring out what to do to help her beat it. So much was out of my control.
Farcaster was a surprising oasis for me. A place to connect with people on a human level. I wrote about her illness, my processing of it, and my grief after her passing. People were incredibly kind and empathetic. Not what you’d expect from social media. I’ll never know for sure, but I have a suspicion that Farcaster filled a need at a time when my brain was elastic and created a foundation and love that is now permanent.
3. URL TO IRL PIPELINE
The third thing that makes Farcaster special is something we started calling the URL to IRL pipeline: creating relationships first online and then bringing them into the real world.
Farcaster looks a lot like other social media platforms – there is a user profile where you can upload a PFP (profile pic), a place to write a short bio, and a twitter-like feed where you can post updates. What was different is that most people’s PFPs were graphic avatars, not pictures of themselves. When you meet someone in real life, the first thing you do is take in all sorts of visual cues. Hair style, clothing, shoes, skin color, height, age, accent, – all things you can take in and make quick assumptions about the person in front of you. When you meet someone for the first time what do you ask but “What do you do?” On Farcaster it’s different. I was meeting people based on their words and thoughts about topics. I became friends with people because of their ideas and thoughts without knowing anything about them.
I remember the first person who reached out and asked me to jump on a zoom. It felt a little odd because that wasn't happening on other social media sites I was active on, but I said sure. I had a 30-minute conversation with tldr and we just got to know each other. No expectations. He wasn’t trying to get anything from me. We just got to know each other. I’ve since had at least a dozen zoom calls with people on the feed.
I went to the NFT NYC meetup in 2023. It was a little weird. I am in my mid 40s. I am a suburban mom. Most people were in their 20s and 30s but the energy was awesome. I met Ted and Matthew and J4ck and Papa and many others for the first time.
I then went to FarCon in Boston. That also felt weird. Traveling to a different city to meet 70 internet strangers. But it was so worth it. I met Nounish Prof who would later become my cofounder and business partner.
4. IT'S NOT DULL
Farcaster was still in beta for most of my first year. Only in late 2023 did it become permissionless where anyone could sign up. Even today with tens of thousands of daily active users, Farcaster is still at small platform that has not found product market fit.
But there's an upside to hanging out in an emergent space. It's exciting and energizing. It's constantly and continuously changing. It’s also where founders of other new apps and services are launching their products to get feedback. As I wrote above, I hadn't even heard of TestFlight before Farcaster and now I have a dozen apps because I'm helping founders test their early versions. On Farcaster I’m getting a front row seat to crypto builders.
My Invitation To You
I've been a daily active user on Farcaster since my first day. I came in not knowing a single person. The builder vibes and strong human connections keep me coming back day after day.
At the time of this writing, about 18 months after first joining Farcaster, I have almost 100k followers, I've made dozens of new friends, and I am building a new media business with a cofounder I met on Farcaster.
If your experience on other social media sites has gotten worse over the years, like how my Twitter experience degraded, if you're looking for a more wholesome corner of the internet, or a place to meet interesting and kind people, I encourage you to check out Farcaster.
Join Farcaster
Ways to get on Farcaster:
Use this link with an invitation to check our Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/~/invite-page/5818?id=f280ec84
Download the Warpcast app from the AppStore for iOS or Android
It costs ~$5 /year to use Farcaster. If we are connected on another platform, feel free to DM me for a code and I'll cover the cost of your first year.
I wrote this essay as part of the first Farcaster Writing Hackathon. If you have any questions or you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.
Please give a warm welcome to my friend @torqeh , the materials engineer mentioned in my cast below 😇 Welcome to Farcaster, @torqeh 🤗 Do you have any first impressions? BTW @maryams.eth , this other Maryam (torqeh) is how I guessed how to pronounce your name 😉
welcome @torqeh!
😍🙌🏼 Welcome @torqeh!
feel like a little girl stepping into a new world! Love this feeling 😅
If you want to learn a little about farcaster, here's the original blog post one of the founders wrote with the concept for Farcaster: https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks And here’s a blog post I wrote about why I love it here - https://paragraph.xyz/@adrienne/why-i-love-farcaster, And if you want to check out our podcast, you can search "GM Farcaster" on spotify or apple or wherever you listen to podcasts, or if you prefer youtube: - https://www.youtube.com/@gmfarcaster - and Here's a Farcaster 101 curriculum we created last year in https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrsgGZ0hNAouXqVfTgiguJFFDBUn6-p9p But mostly just have fun and feel free to ask questions as you explore 🤗
this summary was great. the concept of centralization was something I struggled a lot which is why I’m not active anywhere and this new primitive of farcaster is so much closer to the ideal than other networks.
What do people here have in common? Did they all work in crypto? Were they all developers? Designers? Founders? Investors? Were they all Silicon Valley based? Were they all in their 20s, 30s, 40s? I tried to map them to existing communities I knew of elsewhere. It broke my brain because I couldn’t find a common denominator. Then it hit me. Everyone identified as a builder. https://paragraph.xyz/@adrienne/why-i-love-farcaster?referrer=0xaeA4A0dEDb94BA5b2b8ED9477A8a54379C584542
“A builder creates something that wouldn't exist in this world but for them and their effort. Whether it's software, an app, a website, a company, a brand, a blog, a poem, a meal, a photograph, a painting, a family. True builders are inherently positive sum people. There was no one in Farcaster who was looking to extract value from someone else, they were all creating something new.” https://paragraph.xyz/@adrienne/why-i-love-farcaster?referrer=0xaeA4A0dEDb94BA5b2b8ED9477A8a54379C584542
I love this. I should do a retrospective on my time here, but early on I wrote about my cautious optimism. https://polluterofminds.com/blog/the-open-data-nostalgia-of-farcaster
i'm a builder!
Planning to write up something for my Twitter friends about: 1. Why I like Farcaster 2. How to get the most out of it if you want to try it Any suggestions for good resources or tips I should include? Things other people have shared to help onboard people?
maybe you could ask this as an open inquiry to people and im pretty sure there would be some answers in there that will give you good material. the ones that love it in here, really love it in here. this place is fun af
I particularly like the open graph, connecting to multiple apps @rodeodotclub @drakula etc. with the same account, finding connections on other apps like @zora, etc. as a user same can be said for developers, solving the cold start problem
cc @adrienne has onboarded a few people, @afrochicks always has good advice, @nonlinear.eth keeps it real would manage expectations and say it costs $5 (or offer to gift them an account) imo the best way to onboard and retain is by engaging; drop suggested follows for specific topics and let those users know in advance so they can engage with any new accounts
thx Ted. @nateliason - I've written two personal essays about why I found Farcaster special. https://adrienneshulman.medium.com/the-power-of-scenius-farcaster-and-the-collective-genius-of-communities-244f018a8767 https://paragraph.xyz/@adrienne/why-i-love-farcaster and you will definitely want to check out @cameron 's iconic Fast Rope essay https://www.wysr.xyz/p/fast-rope-into-farcaster
Ty!! 500 $DEGEN
Thanks @adrienne 🫡
- Unless you're already into crypto, find mundane corners (for me, /running & /parenting) - moxie setup - if you can build, it's a wonderful creative outlet and the vibes are very supportive - get someone to intro you via /welcome - don't get scammed, DMs & emails are the primary means. don't download games or click on fake zoom links. If there's any doubt, ask someone who knows better
Beautiful, thank you! 376 $DEGEN
the other thing is I've really gone out of my way to mention new people and help them get initial engagement the algorithm is changing all the time, and I've seen new users get either surprisingly great engagement (me) as well as almost nothing (others) makes or breaks the experience imo
i think its just been something i havent been trying to optimize, just pop over here every few days and over time i am liking it more
Yeah I wasn't trying to take it seriously either, just slowly found myself spending more time here vs Twitter
frames is what i guess is the topic to talk about and how builders can bootstrap on-chain distribution to build micro SaaS opportunities i like to do a twitter if it was open source vs warpcast presentation for my team at times so that format also happens.
Start being part of a community and help build the Moxie community.
I'm mixed on whether to talk about Moxie and Degen or not. On the one hand, yay money. But on the other, it might activate people's "oh this is another crypto ponzi" filters
Yeah, I would avoid tbh, will turn most people off from the get-go, tends to be a noisy narrative If they’re interested in that stuff they’ll have no problem finding it on their own anyway
when I onboarded a new to crypto friend, I helped her get set up with moxie (connect wallet address to FC, mint the moxie NFT), and then basically didn't mention it eventually came back and was like, oh btw you've been earning. here's how to claim. I wish it were even more invisible, but I feel like this is was a good flow
When Degen started, I really enjoyed the first season. The other seasons and the other tokens that came to Warpcast were all about farming. I just started with Moxie, and I'm able to enjoy it again.
Farcaster has less price chatter because the user base is a higher % builder / creator than CT. It’s a high agency mindset.
This is true even for FC-inspired tokens like Degen and Moxie
… very sensitive, very demure. I was just going to cast to the trench warriors if anyone could catch me up on the current market dynamics. Guess we’ll be narrowcasting that one.
Totally agree. I’ve written about this in several blogs and honestly don’t think you get enough credit for your “DM me a link to what you’re building” invite strategy early on. Using Chris Dixon’s computer vs. casino distinction, farcaster attracts computer people - we’re trying to build the next iteration of the internet and today’s price is irrelevant. Here’s the most recent blog where I wrote about farcaster builder culture https://paragraph.xyz/@adrienne/why-i-love-farcaster
This is true. The early vibes with access to really talented people was what attracted me. At this point in farcaster I think it's time to look at more of the general CT audience as the target. We probably have all the builder and creators we can get with the limited consumer base.
What is CT?
We dont talk about prices cause we know that if we do our thing properly, prices will go up in the long run
/higher mindset
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
Minds who care about source reference attribution - in an era of a lot of derivative content - quote sources
i know google sucks but a lot of people seem to be forgetting its use cases around here every day
Picominds discuss prices
ok banger
What kind of minds discuss minds in aphoristic exchange?
Are you saying you want me to chat about prices more?
building sand castles doesnt really count dan
Why so negative?
were talkin user base strictly not a pointed attack at you. so im assuming the algo is still tailored towards what i like though im not as active. "builders/creators" as mentioned that are not attached to price is a disconnect that feels dated and not geared towards a responsibility to build and deliver with purpose. my bias. also x has more opportunity to connect on that level... us rn
I think he’s having a bad day
agree. does that factor in to what you think good content is here vs on other social media? personally feel like dependency on the algo and mirroring pmarca's tweets here show a bias towards lower agency consumption
Here are the two most interesting thoughts that touched my heart while reading @adrienne article for /writinghackathon. 1. The cultural code of Farcaster - it's a network for builders. This could be software, an app, a website, a company, a brand, a blog, a poem, a meal, a photograph, a painting, a family, and so on. 2. Bringing relationships into real life. 99% of people didn't know each other before meeting here, but they happily meet in real life through the URL-IRL pipeline called Farcaster. I'm suggesting we have a Farcaster IRL meetup at DevCon in Bangkok from November 12-15. As a first step to building this new pipeline, I've created a group to coordinate Farcaster fans at DevCon in Bangkok, November 12-15. We'll help each other get around and organize at least one meetup. DM me to join the private group. https://paragraph.xyz/@adrienne/why-i-love-farcaster
we could even have a in person Farcaster onboarding setup. I'd be down to help with that. make onboarding easy, add challenges and make sure there is very low friction to get active and experience the network so users don't drop out afterwards and retain
Sounds very promising. Please check your DMs.
Replied 🫡
Farcaster is a second home for many of us, we found here a new friends and almost a family🫶 Nice article, thanks for sharing this and your thoughts😉
Hey love to help & collaborate. Dmed
Great job 👌🏻 900 $DEGEN
A great reason to meet. Meeting people who have previously communicated only together online always carries some kind of mystery
Just wanted to make
My 2nd submission for the /writinghackathon Why I love Farcaster - my personal account of how and why I became a daily active user
💜💜💜
Adrienne, this was such a fantastic read. I usually struggle reading more than a paragraph, my mind starts to wander but I was glued to your story. Your experience here has been so wonderful and authentic and learning about the early days of Farcaster helps me greater understand the app as a whole. I’m so sorry about your Mum but I’m very happy you had a place to process your feelings with supportive friends around you 🤍🤍
You are so sweet Renee , i appreciate you 🫂 Hope you’ve been feeling better and can’t wait to get you and your art on /gmfarcaster !!
Thanks Adrienne. I’m really looking forward to it! Slowly getting better, just need to trade in my body for a better one 😁😁
“a more wholesome corner of the internet” 🫶
loved reading this 🫶🏻 2000 $degen
Me too!❤️❤️ And the 4 main reasons that make fc so special is spot on. Also loved that you built a website with your daughter🥹
Thank you both for reading ☺️ Glad it resonated with someone 💜💜
how do i participate? is it too late now
Thank you for sharing ♥️ Bookmarked 🥰
New blog post by @adrienne on discovering Farcaster, a social network built on Ethereum. Starting as an alternative to Twitter, it became a daily habit. Adrienne details the unique culture, human connections, and builder vibes that make Farcaster special. Read more to get inspired!