Yesterday I had a call with @shiiiison, who seems to be in all the same hypersub-gated group chats I’m in. @shiiiison showed me a one-sheet of a project they are working on that leverages their existing instagam audience, an audience of 375,000 corgi enthusiasts. @shiiiison is a dog-father of two corgis, Brady & Graffiti, and has been running social media for them on Youtube, TIktok, & Instagram for a while now, amassing a significant following. In a coincidence, @shiiiison is also a Farcaster advocate and crypto user. I won’t go into more details about the project they are working on but let’s just say I’m very bullish on mass corgi adoption.
375,000 followers is a lot of people. Farcaster has 193,111 total users, which means that just these two corgi’s have 181k more users than exist as users on OUR ENTIRE NETWORK. Given the number of bots, airdrop farmers, and zombie accounts, the real number of Farcaster users is much lower. Less than 3,000 Farcaster users have casted more than 250 times over the past 30 days. Want to be one of the most active accounts on here? Cast more than 250 times and you've made it, buddy.
This isn’t an instagram vs. farcaster post, but it is useful to remember how in spite of all the buzz & new attention, Farcaster remains essentially a sleepy backwater inhabited by a small, dedicated community of early adopters.
Whenever crypto people talk about mass adoption they always seem to make the assumption that the masses want to adopt crypto. I’m much more cynical: much of the masses hate crypto, or at least have strong negative associations with that word. Lots of people are unlikely to join a social media platform dominated not by “builders” as many people claim, but by “crypto builders,” people working within the belly of the beast. We’ve had relatively advanced crypto-financial infrastructure for years, there is plenty for people to do with their money here if they want to speculate, invest, or earn yield and the onboarding getting better and better. We have ETFs! So I doubt that the problem is as purely technical as many seem to believe. It's certainly also a cultural issue: our culture just doesn't yet have mass appeal. Sometimes, we can sound more like a cult than a community, like as much as I hate banks, I don’t want to go bankless, and neither do most people I know. Its just not practical in this moment, my girlfriend would never, and I mean NEVER, take her hard earned money, withdraw it from a bank, and put it into a non-FDIC insured stable coin yield protocol using a self-custody wallet. No amount of token yield will convince her to do so. No amount of disdain for the federal government or the bankers will convince her that she should trust code more than the full faith and authority of the United States. And this is someone who hears, on a daily basis, positive news about the industry directly from someone she “loves” or at least claims to love. Its an uphill battle.
But corgis, they are different.
Let’s assume half of Shii’s corgi fan audience hates crypto, will never join Farcaster, and will be turned off even hearing about it. Okay good, see ya later. That still leaves an audience the size of all of Farcaster's current users. Now here is a hot take: what if onboarding even just 100 of these instagram corgi-lovers was a win?
This would mean 100 people who don’t own any tokens, who don't have SOL or BTC or ETH, and don't want to have them. They might not even know what a token is, but they are familiar with downloading an app. They can registering a FID, just don't tell them what the hell a FID is (seriously, we are abstracting away some complicated stuff and introducing a whole range of new complicated stuff, this damn industry...).
What those 100 people certainly can do is join /corgis, and post their favorite photos of Brady & Graffiti…maybe this is what mass adoption looks like. It’s not going to happen overnight, but if those 100 users are introduced to corgi content they can’t find elsewhere, if they have a chance to connect with a creator they love, and do so on Farcaster in a way they cannot on Instagram, I imagine that some of them will stick around. And what do we know about sticking around Farcaster? Usually, it will result in being introduced to crypto. Maybe these users cast a lot and suddenly have a $DEGEN allocation, an active badge, and a bunch of new friends who also love corgis. What is the critical mass of /corgi lovers that would justify an Instagram user spending time on the purple app? I’m not sure. But it likely isn’t in the thousands, maybe 100 people is enough to start. If even 50 people are casting about corgis, they might be the only 50 people on farcaster doing so. That may sound negative, the numbers are low, but it’s also intimate. There is an attraction to being part of small communities, our lives are full of them: circles of friends, people with shared values, politics, appreciation for the same art, or the same dogs. These are the natural decentralized social networks that make up the fabric of humanity, globally. So please, for the sake of Farcaster remember to just be a normal person and post a picture of your pet on here every once and a while or we'll scare away everyone else.
The point here is that we think of mass adoption as an enormous wave of users, but it might look more like a trickle. What matters, I think, is not how many users, but which users. I’ll be more bullish and less skeptical about Farcaster the minute that we start to see communities form who 1) never cast about crypto 2) cast a lot about corgis 3) are having enough fun casting about corgis that they don’t mind that everyone else is casting about crypto.
Yesterday, after my call with @shiiiison they responded to one of my casts with a photo of their dog, Brady, with a rose in its mouth. I realized that seeing a cute dog on the timeline made me feel like I was just using the internet, not like I was holed up in a weird, accelerationist, sufficiently decentralized crypto social network app. This was a great feeling, I hope we can chase it.
