Welcome, new Farcaster user!!!
What exactly IS Farcaster, you might be asking yourself? Simply put, it's one interpretation of what sufficiently decentralized social media should look like in practice.
It's not the only one, but something about it has drawn you here. If Farcaster has one differentiator, it's being community first. Your average Farcaster user probably doesn't value sentient fortune cookies, self-appointed thought leaders or stock promoters NFT hype machines.
If you're active on web2 social media, the Farcaster interface is probably pretty intuitive for you. There are currently clients for OSX, Android, and iOS. Some features, like messaging or Direct Casts are not yet available on the OSX client.
Community Norms
Things are still evolving in the Farcaster ecosystem, but here's what I've observed thus far:
Lead with kindness and empathy. Farcaster is a friendly and understanding place.
The current social composition of Farcaster is builder-heavy, so this is definitely the place to geek out.
Playfulness is encouraged. Serious topics are given their due weight here, but Farcastians like to have fun.
Actual authenticity, not the influencooor 'post only the best parts of your life' is practiced and sought out.
If you want to say more than the character limit, don't thread, do a screenshot essay instead. This is where you use your favourite notes app to write your content and then screenshot it and attach it to your cast as an image.
Polling! There is not a native poll widget yet, so tell your Farcastians how they should vote. 'Hey! What's your favourite colour? 1 for red, 2 for blue.'
Terms You Need To Know
Purple App - A phrase to refer to Farcaster, based on the colour scheme of the clients and logo.
__________-caster - 'Caster' is often used in apps built on Farcaster, sections of the Farcaster social graph, etc.
Cast - A post on Farcaster.
People
Dan Romero - @dwr on Farcaster, one of Farcaster's founders.
Varun Srinivasan - @v on Farcaster, another founder!
Things
Farcaster already has a thriving app ecosystem, you can find them on LaunchCaster.
Some emerging favourites are:
InstaCaster (An instagram-like display of Farcaster posts with images)
EventCaster (a collection of irl events thrown by Farcastians)
Paragraph itself has a Farcaster comment integration, Casts with a link to a post (like this one!) in them get added as comments to the post itself.
Places
When Farcastians want to hang out in more of a real time fashion, here's where they do it!
Farcaster Beta Telegram Group - Ask @dwr for the current invite, this is a telegram group for people to provide feedback and opinions on Farcaster
Unlonely - Already having a vibrant creator community, Unlonely is the place to be. With a main time slot of 7 PM PST Monday-Friday and more being created, it's a fun Twitch-like hangout spot. Users with a POAP can assign 'video tasks' aka Youtube videos for the streamers to watch, and anyone can vote for who will get a particular time slot.