Farcaster

think i finally have a coherent model for how platforms typically fail to retain a lot of the initial buzz once the buzz-generating event is over

the 'one group chat' turns into many, and 'focus on the product/protocol' always overshadows 'hire community management to keep the vibes' 

the extractive nature of FC dynamics makes it even harder here, b/c new ppl looking around don't see what's been extracted from the 'lobby', the group chats or the social clubs and often bounce

still think the channel changes are the only sustainable way to do things but i always wonder what clubhouse or FC would have looked like if there was 'founding community manager' hired alongside 'founding engineers'

backend eng; full-stack curious

writer, icon, retired rave queen

it won't now, i guess what i'm saying is that at varying periods there has been a lot of raw gold in farcaster's domain and when farcaster itself didn't mine it some ppl got their picks and shovels going

everyone on the network was able to partake a bit in that raw gold however only a subset now do after it's been extracted

A community manager won’t solve retention. 

It will help on the margin, but Farcaster has never had a unique social primitive to fuel growth. That’s what drives growth and retention (“only on Farcaster”).

Clubhouse had that for a bit but then Twitter Spaces.

There’s a reason no scaled social network has been built in 10 years other than TikTok (which spent $1B).