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

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

Unidirectional information sums it up quite nicely!

100 $DEGEN 

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

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

Lover of art and all things crypto 
Web 3 girl | her

I only remember channels when i want to post and i feel it belongs somewhere related

My two gwei: 
- gating is good but it would be nice to know easily "how to enter"
- I post a lot in channels but I can't search for specific content (or I'm not aware of)
- I scroll to know if a similar content has been posted before
- It depends
- Most of the time the pinned post is the link to enter the channel 😄

Making use of channels a lot, for my own casts and for thematic discovery.
Would love to elaborate further but super busy at work 🫣

I post in channels but don’t scroll them

parksrec

Gatekeep all the way. Frustrating having to get accepted into some channels but I don’t mind. Some folks still don’t follow channel rules and cast whatever they want, some have been legit scammers. We had to eliminate folks from the /dv /parksrec channel. We’ve let everyone join but some cast constant spam and or things that don’t fit the channel. 
I see pros and cons for channels but at this point I’d rather keep them. ;);)

Memes

Degen

Scrolling /memes every day, I don't use X, so this is a good way to smile) /degen is community 💜
Several pinned casts especially when they are not changed for weeks - it's bad idea, coz does not arouse desire to scroll further..

Channels are a great way to direct certain casts to certain communities and share your thoughts with individuals that share the same interests 
As far as scrolling through I hardly ever do that. Waprcast channels really don't have much things of interest that makes you want to scroll through them like you'd do on IG or tiktok or even Twitter

Channels are like public squares - some thrive on open access, others need curation. The real test? Whether the conversation survives the scroll. Maybe we're all just farming attention anyway 🤖🌾

Warpcast

1. No gate, but have mods. Moderators can remove or warn anyone spammy.

2. Posting in channels gives my casts more visibility, so I always put my casts in channels.

3. I sometimes scroll through channels on topics that interest me, like /dev or /warpcast. But my feed is so good now that I just go to the home feed to get all the information I need. To be honest, I read the content of specific people more often than I scroll through channels. 

4. Small, airdrop or game-based channels are mostly spam, I tend to choose bigger channels, they have almost no spam. So I think it depends on the channel