Welcome to the first official idea from Concept Testing!
As a reminder of how all this works, you can read our announcement post.
▼Or, here's a short summary:
If you like this idea and want to be a part of making it a reality, collect this post.
We'll make a group chat on Warpcast of the collectors to discuss in more detail and help define an MVP.
We'll publish the MVP details and launch a crowdfund.
The raised funds will go toward a bounty to build the concept.
Alright, on to the concept!
What is Cozycast?
Cozycast is a way to filter the firehose of Farcaster into feeds that matter to you.
We envision a simple app that is designed to let users stay focused on the people, channels, and communities of their choice – free from additional noise.
Using a mix of the Farcaster social graph and onchain data, Cozycast users will be able to create feeds to their own liking.
Why Now?
The recent explosion in user growth has transformed the experience on Farcaster. For a long time, you could pretty easily see whatever was posted by the people you followed. Starting at the end of January, the number of daily users spiked, reaching over 40,000 unique casters at the peak. To put that growth in context, the network only registered 2,000 daily casters (95% fewer people!) once in December.
The Warpcast team did an admirable job moving quickly to prevent spam and “low quality” casts from appearing on the main feed. However, the amount of content on Farcaster grew by an order of magnitude in a relatively short time...
In the early weeks of this new era, overwhelmed users retreated to private group chats (only released in mid-January themselves!) and ventured out onto the frontier with niche channels.
Both of these behaviors will continue, but they won’t solve the core challenge of curating the conversations on Farcaster.
Warpcast continues to work on moderation tools, but mainly for channel hosts. For the individual user, there aren't any great tools to curate the stream of casts. As of now, there is no way to mute specific channels – you will see posts from people you follow even in channels you're not a part of. (This is great for discovery, but not for coziness.)
Farcaster is only going to keep growing – which means more users, more communities, and more noise to sift through. And crucially, noise is different for everyone.
What is the Solution?
Fortunately, with a sufficiently decentralized network, we can build new products that are designed for a different browsing experience, using the same underlying data.
For example, Dan has mentioned repeatedly that someone could build an app that only shows casts from the first N accounts.
However, FIDs are just one variable that can be used for curation. Other onchain data, such as token balances, NFT ownership, and specific network activity, may be useful for filtering feeds for different use cases and preferences. Farcaster data, such as follows, casts, and channels, aren't technically onchain but are available through Hubs.
It's easy to imagine a feed for /purple only featuring casts from those who actually hold a Purple NFT. Or a feed that focuses on prolific Zora creators. If you're a creator of onchain content, you could create a feed that features people who have collected your work. In the future, custom feeds could leverage some sort of decentralized reputation score.
Cozycast lets people design feeds however they want.
Scoping an MVP
Concept Testing is designed to get ideas from 0 to 1. We want to test concepts based on the core idea instead of launching fully-featured products.
For Cozycast, that means a relatively minimal experience focused on custom feeds. It is designed to be used as a complement to robust clients like Warpcast.
An MVP would likely be read-only (link out to Warpcast) and have no notifications. (Does this make it cozier?!)
Reminder: since Concept Testing projects are open-source, this wouldn't necessarily be the end state. If a concept gets funded and built, anyone can keep working on it or incorporate the code into their own project!
The specific details will be hammered out in a working group before being finalized for a crowdfund and bounty.
If you'd like to be part of that group, collect this post!
Parting Thoughts
This is not the first time that someone has explored the idea of custom feeds. In fact, David Furlong (@df) built Discove more than a year ago to solve a similar problem.
David discussed some of the reasons for pivoting / shutting down the project here.
The major difference between Discove and Cozycast, in my eyes, isn't the product but "business model". Discove was a founder-led project that ultimately required a steady source of revenue to continue development. Cozycast has no "founder", will raise funds before development, and be open-source for anyone to continue working on or plug into their own project.
We're looking forward to working with founders on these projects. Instead of incubating competitors to nascent products, we believe that Concept Testing can be an asset to builders with similar ambitions. Most obviously, we can fund development that founders can freely implement into their own projects. But we can also drive awareness of a problem and highlight those that are working toward on solutions. Open-sourcing our work makes the Farcaster ecosystem resilient: it "raises the floor" for users by ensuring that these necessary functions will always be available, even if founders decide to pivot or sunset their products. However, the best experiences will always be built by dedicated founders that obsess over their products and listen to users.
