If you are a new farcaster user, you might have seen some people rocking "q/dau" in their farcaster names.

If you are confused about what it means, you are not alone:

So let's answer, for the first time in a long form, the big question:

What is q/dau?

In short:

q/dau is for farcaster what e/acc is for AI — a bottom up movement to grow farcaster into the most important social network in the world.

Everybody knows e/acc.

e/acc is a movement of people who believe that the only way to solve AI risks is pushing the tech forward as fast as possible, without any regulatory boundaries. The alternative is AI safety movement, claiming that AI is a dangerous force, thus its development should be slowed down and controlled by large corporations and governments.

q/dau is a movement of people who want farcaster to become the most important social platform on the internet and they contribute to it by being an extreme example of a quality daily active user.

It's a permissionless brand.

No leaders, not guidelines.

Just extremely quality daily active users.

History of q/dau

QDAU stands from "quality daily active user" and is a metric that Dan is using as farcaster protocol north star.

Between October and November 2023 it became increasingly common for Dan to auto reject any feature request that wouldn't "grow DAU".

It became funny. Everybody would joke and reference it quite often.

Then one day, we had this exchange with @grin.

Grin would compare being qDAU to being e/acc and it instantly clicked for me.

q/dau is the e/acc of farcaster.

The perfect alignment with the growth of the protocol.

But q/dau has no definition.

It's not a rule, it's a vibe.

Everybody deserves their own q/dau manifesto.

(my personal) q/dau manifesto

q/dau is a permissionless brand and you tell your own story by subscribing to it

If you don't want to create your own story, you can use mine.

This is my q/dau manifesto:

1. You are a DAU. You show up every day. You are reliable, you are here, being present is important to you.

2. You are quality. You contribute, you make the network better, you help others.

3. You are a tech and crypto optimist. You want to accelerate, you want to move the world off from the centralized social networks and on Farcaster.

4. Acceleration is good. We are solving problems on the way. Growth is what matters. Reject the OG elitism, reject the groupchat vibes. Embrace speed.

Point 4 may be controversial for some.

Some loved farcaster for being a small place.

I personally like it larger.

Join q/dau