Farcaster Devs

How are FC clients building on channels if they're not part of the protocol yet?

i believe channels are just parent_urls that you reply to, so that is technically part of the protocol. channel follows are what's not protocol-level, so you can read and write casts to channels but you can't follow a channel outside of warpcast

+1 - yeah you can derive "channels" based on casts' parents, but the concept of a Channel is specific to Warpcast unfortunately

So things like Channel followers and metadata is *not* available via free / Hub data