Warpcast is absolutely one of my favorite spaces on the internet these days and it’s where I pretty much spend all of my social media time now. While I used to mostly lurk and idly surf on there, I’ve recently started to get a lot more intentional and serious about connecting with people through it.
If this is the first you’re hearing of Warpcast and are wondering what it is, it’s a permissionless, decentralized social media app built on top of the Farcaster protocol scratch that, we promised this newsletter would be radically simple so here’s all you need to know: Warpcast is a recent social media app that was launched in February 2023 by a company called Merkle Manufactory.
From last year until a couple of months ago, access was only available to a small group of beta users but it went public earlier this year so anyone can sign up to use the app right now from anywhere.
In the few months since I started using Warpcast somewhat more actively, I’ve attempted to get a couple of my friends on board as well and one thing I quickly realized was that it wasn’t exactly clear to them why they should join yet another social media platform especially one not generally popular yet and that hasn’t captured the cultural zeitgeist that prompts people to join a social platform out of fear of missing out.
It’s in a bid to preemptively address this for future conversations that I decided to write this.
Firstly, I need to start by saying I don’t think Warpcast in its current iteration is for everyone nor has it hit a phase where it’s likely to be broadly appealing yet. At the moment, Warpcast has about 50,000 daily active users, a number that I believe will be a lot higher one year from now. But I personally believe Warpcast as it exists right now is for you if:
You care deeply about using social media as a tool for globally connecting with people.
You are generally very curious and like to be an early adopter of new tech/products.
You care about exerting more intentionality with regards to what you consume via social media and want more transparency with how what gets shown to you is being curated.
It's not that you can’t use X (fka Twitter) or most of the social media apps out there to globally connect with people or any of the above. It’s more that given the current climate of the legacy social media apps, the average user doesn’t really default to thinking of them for these purposes anymore and tends to think more along the lines of using them to keep up with people they already know, content from their favorite creators, and what’s generally new pop-culture-wise. At least, that’s how it was for me.
There is nothing wrong with using social media to keep up with the people who matter to you — your family and friends. However, an underlying ethos for social media during its inception was how it could be used as a means to globally connect and make new friends around the world without the restriction of borders.
Like with many things, the 80/20 rule also holds true here. Most people don’t feel the inclination to participate in the social media value chain but for many who do, the current climate with the legacy social media apps doesn’t feel too encouraging in this regard. There’s a lot of vitriol flying around, and while your attention is recognized as a valuable currency, the focus is on how it can be farmed and tweaked to serve a bottom line.
To put it simply, it’s much easier to doomscroll than try to connect, to passively consume rather than actively participate.
What Warpcast Is Like:
Warpcast is often described as a cross between X and Reddit, a description that I don’t think is far off. It basically leans heavily into microblogging via text which makes it a great haven for conversations.
Here’s how I think Warpcast presents a better alternative than what we currently have as the norm with traditional social media apps when it comes to the points I made above.
Making global connections: Something I find extremely cool about Warpcast right now is the fact that it hasn’t entered the mainstream yet means being active on there for the average person requires that you build your social graph (audience and followers) from scratch. If you get invited by someone, that might be the only pre-existing relationship you have when you join.
The auto-follow recommendations for new users are a diverse list of accounts on the platform so engaging with people on there translates to gradually forming relationships with people across the world that you previously didn’t know. I’ve personally seen a lot of interesting outcomes firsthand from relationships on Warpcast: people starting projects/companies together (heck, this newsletter is a collaboration between myself and a friend I made on Warpcast), people intensely supporting each other’s products, companies, etc.
The vibe is more welcoming & friendly, and the culture tends more towards good natured conversations rather than being combative.Being an early adopter: There are a lot of interesting new products and tech applications I have primarily discovered through Warpcast, and that’s really because a majority of the active scene there are builders working in interesting new fields like crypto.
If you are a curious person who likes being early to using products with a likelihood of growing in popularity and adoption, then I simply can’t recommend Warpcast enough. I strongly believe we’ll see a number of million-dollar products emerge there, and you’ll have a front-row seat to seeing these companies take shape and evolve in real-time. To be on Warpcast is to be at the forefront of (crypto) innovation.
One of my all-time favorite products that I’ve discovered on there and actively use is Daimo, an app that makes it easy to globally send and receive money using Stablecoins, and there are even more interesting functionalities native to Warpcast like ‘Frames’ which allows you to interact with an app right from your feed. It means you can perform in-app actions without having to leave your Warpcast feed.
Intentional about what you consume: If you are aiming for more intention when it comes to what you consume during your time online and would prefer to streamline it to a particular topic, Warpcast gives you a lot of agency in this regard via a feature called ‘Channels’.
Think of channels as kind of like sub-reddits, they are conversational spaces exclusively focused on one topic, there are channels dedicated to music, reading, food, and more esoteric interests plus you can always create a channel that you think should exist so you can pretty much curate the content you consume by spending time exclusively in channels relating to your interests and ignoring what else is generally happening.
Another huge unlock with Warpcast in this regard is not having to contend with any ads, Warpcast eschews the ad model for social media for an onboarding fee of $5 which means that in effect you get to see only the things you want to see and signal that you want to see.
To be clear, it’s not that I think Warpcast is an idyllic platform with no issues whatsoever. Being in a relatively early phase means it still has a number of growing problems:
The scene there often tends heavily towards crypto chatter because that’s the space where a fair number of initial users come from.
There’s a lot of in-group synchrony; many people there share similar views on technology, crypto etc. which is great and contributes to the homey feel of the conversations. However, it also means there isn’t as much diversity as there could be.
Some people might find the onboarding flow that requires owning a crypto wallet and backing up a recovery phrase too tedious.
But despite that, I think the (potential) value-add far surpasses the trade-offs and the experience will only get much better especially because the team behind it is one very committed to listening to user feedback and shipping fast.
If you’re curious about Warpcast and are open to checking it out, you can indicate your interest by leaving a comment under this post or sending a mail and we might send a free invite your way.
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