First Draft Club

Are Channels Still the Future of Farcaster? (🧵)

I used to think so. Now? Not so sure.

Back in April 2024, spam was everyone’s problem on Farcaster. Then the channel overhaul happened and shifted the spam burden to hosts. If your channel is full of spam, it’s on you: Gate better. Moderate harder. Ban faster. 

It’s exhausting and most channel hosts have ignored it or automated it, confusing new folks and aggravating old ones who can’t cast into channels freely. 

Fast forward to April 2025: spammers got smarter. The current model aggressively flags most users as low-value. 80% of casts are orphaned—no replies, no recasts, no likes. Worse, casting into channels doesn’t trigger spam labels, which flipped the whole dynamic and spammers gravitate to casting into some channels hoping for visibility.

These are my questions for all of you: 

	•	To gate or not to gate?
	•	Is anyone even posting in channels?
	•	Does anyone scroll them?
	•	Are channels just for farmers (and not the FarmVille kind)?
	•	Can a community survive on a single pinned cast?

Pi-chi.eth (she/her) Artist /animeoutcasts
Hosting: /sakura /kyoto /momiji  /anime-manga /farcasterunion

https://portrait.so/pichi

That’s good questions. I am posting in channels but not really a wide choice of. 

My own channels are like uni directional informations portalsometimes. But the communities are very vital and very engaged behind that. 

I think this pinned cast question. Yes it’s possible. THE BOLE is 4290 users and one cast 🙌 but it’s this frame with the power

artist and dev.. building some things. /hamsters /rewardr. Cooking BOLEs. chilling in tub often. doing things I like.

Yes I am using them to reach out to the interested people. It’s more like they have subbed to the daily news. 

Yes definitely. Frames are extreme powerful. Running this three frames is an incredible experiment. I still can’t imagine. I made just one cast and it’s much more active users in this frame then my whole followers x 2. that’s super insane. And I can notify all at once.

Unidirectional information sums it up quite nicely!

100 $DEGEN 

Are you using channel announcements? Seems mini apps have the power right now with notifications.