Stream of consciousness on channels

1. The overwhelming top complaint about the new channels is “I lost access” / “I can’t cast in the channels I used to”

2. The root of this is channels ran for a year as public topics / hashtags and we nudged people to cast in channels for a minor distribution boost.

3. When we launched channels last year, one of the fears was people wouldn’t cast in channels, since Twitter has tried versions of this and people were too used to casting on main / in the home timeline. 

4. Farcaster user behavior was more nascent / “plastic” / early adopters. So we ended up getting most people to cast in channels.

5. The other reality is most people want to maximize distribution. So telling them “channels = more distribution” is hard to unlearn, esp. if you’re more of a weekly active user.

Dogs

Food

I've read a number of casts about how the channels have changed but still can't wrap my head around it, still living in the topics paradigm. I don't get why I shouldn't cast a photo of my dog in /dogs or a photo of my dinner in /food with all the other similar content 🤷‍♀️

Farcaster OG 💜 serial dabbler • foodie • dog owner • co-host in /ecocaster 🌱

But it just feels neater to keep similar content together, since there is an option to do that. I think the intention would be clearer if the channels were closed entirely, leaving only communities that have a distinct message and leadership, so the user would have only two casting options - home feed or a closed community.

There’s no distribution boost. Both go to your followers.