As of June 1, 2024, the /slowcore-hq channel has shifted its focus to the fledgling slowcore movement on Farcaster.
If you're just joining us, "slowcore" is a term I made up to express distaste for hustle culture, and the TL;DR is "move slow and preserve things" (h/t Tom Beck). (N.B. I later learned there's also a genre of music called slowcore).
We — channel co-hosts Trish Deneen and I — will soon create a separate channel for Black Stone Sanctuary, the Pagan monastery bootstrapping project.
Why the split into two channels?
Because slowcore has become a Farcaster-seeded movement that "belongs" to the FC scenius and community.
We love slowcore. Now that it's found its way into the fertile soil of the FC scenius to incubate, we want to give it the space it needs to bloom!
Some backstory on how we chose the channel name may be helpful here.
We were originally planning to call our channel /blackstonesanctuary, but that's 19 characters, and the limit is 16. We considered many abbreviations, but none seemed to fit, so we settled on /slowcore-hq. We'd been using the term "slowcore" in our inner circles and taking a slowcore approach to spiritual practice for awhile, so it made sense at the time.
I first used the term "slowcore" on Farcaster in late March and early April while we were preparing for Black Stone Santuary's onchain launch week.
When we launched /slowcore-hq as Black Stone Sanctuary (April 8, 2024), we followed the example of the /fc-updates channel: we required a channel pass, set a high price for it in warps, and made the channel broadcast-only so only Trish and I would post top-level casts. We did this only as a temporary measure to protect everyone's time and attention from spammers/engagement farming, while hoping to encourage high-quality discussion in the comments.
We weren't expecting to need two separate channels. But once channels began decentralizing (May 23, 2024) and the slowcore concept took on a life of its own, we felt it was no longer appropriate to keep /slowcore-hq intertwined with the religious focus of the Black Stone Sanctuary project.
We've put /slowcore-hq in moderation mode and set up moderation through Airstack. All top-level casts in /slowcore-hq that are liked by the Airstack Not A Bot, myself, and/or Trish will appear in the Main feed. Everything else will be in the Unfiltered feed (visible to mods only).
Admin note: the Black Stone Sanctuary cast threads can't be moved over to the new channel. We don't plan to delete them, but we may quote-cast them in the new channel for easy reference.
We'll be exploring the concept of a "slowcore business model" for the Slowcore HQ channel, and will consider monetization options with long-term sustainability in mind. We're excited to experiment (slowly), and we think Farcaster is the right place to do so. Fortunately we've already acquired the ENS name slowcore.eth.
A few things taking shape in the pipeline:
A Slowcore Nerd Notes series of blog posts on Paragraph at A Digital Incubation Space. The first edition, published earlier this week, is a rough sketch of ideas on value flows and the concept of "slowcore value." Upcoming themes include deliberately limiting reach and properly valuing human time and attention.
A Slowcore Question (or quote) of the Day (SQoTD). We'll revisit many questions raised by Tom's recent essay "In Praise of Going Slow," for example.
The Slowcore Bookshelf. We love to read and we look forward to lots of slowcore book recommendations in the channel. A sampling of slowcore classics from my personal collection:
The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia
How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell (already mentioned in the channel by grin)
Slow is Beautiful by Cecile AndrewsMemes. "Slowcore problems, amirite?" Slothy Awards? We're excited to see what FC memelords can do here.
A Slowcore Lexicon. As with the Farcaster Scenius Lexicon, we'll track emergent slowcore terminology via FC-native sources like GM Farcaster. Newly hatched: "slowpilled" (thanks, grin).
Slowcore HQ will get a new PFP. We'll be moving the black Zorb PFP over to the Black Stone Sanctuary channel when it's ready.
Deep-Dive Discussions. We'd love to hear news about development of slowcore-friendly places for deep-dive discussion on Farcaster. We don't have many options at the moment, which means many convos we'd love to dwell on quickly get algorithmically buried and forgotten. Varun recently said Farcaster "almost never" displays any casts more than 72 hours old. Maybe that's ancient in crypto/social media algorithm time, but in slowcore terms it's barely a blink of an eye.
In the meantime, other Farcaster channels for the slowcore-minded to explore include /slow-co-lab and /slowlife.
We love Farcaster. Welcome to Slowcore HQ. May a thousand Slowcore patterns bloom.
~ Danica Swanson and Trish Deneen
Art: "Girl in the Hammock" by Winslow Homer, 1873. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
