A few counter intuitive things we've learned building FC: 

1. Make people sign up on mobile

Push notifications and little red dots on the home screen are the lifeblood of social apps. Most users who sign up on web will simply forget to come back.

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

2. Make your homepage a signup screen, not a feed preview. 

Generic feeds are not compelling. You need some onboarding before you can show an interesting feed that makes people stick around.

Every social network's home page is a simple sign up screen with no preview for this reason.

I actually thought about this some more - Twitter did actually show a feed in the very early days and Reddit still shows content to people without forcing signup. Others (like Facebook) are more private social networks so aren't really comparable.

I think your framing of it is maybe wrong though, because Reddit doesn't show "generic feeds" but shows stuff that will get users interested (topical, high engagement stuff). It would perhaps be more interesting to showcase interesting channels and discussions than a generic feed obv.

The predicament is that there are very many alternative social networks out there and almost all of them force users to sign up to view anything in the first place which prevents people exploring just for the sake of exploring in the first place.