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.

4. Following feeds are bad 

Everyone thinks they want a following feed. But even the people who ask for it churn faster when they get it. 

Following feeds get progressively worse as you follow more people. People used to complain that "the algo" didn't show them their friends.

This was surprising because at that time we didn't have an algo. It turned out they always followed a few people who casted 50 times a day and just drowned out everyone else.

3. Don't be afraid of longer onboarding if it leads to better retention.

When a user commits to signing up they're much more likely to complete onboarding steps. 

As much as people complain about adding pfp's only 0.1% of people churn in the Warpcast flow on that screen. It makes a huge difference to the rest of the network when new profiles have some profile picture that's not algo generated.

Great point—just checked Reddit’s homepage without logging in and the feed is super bland. Never really noticed that. 4chan’s different—you pick a topic first, which makes it more engaging right from the start 🧐

That’s valuable insight. From intuition alone, I would have guessed the opposite — my first reaction (stated, not revealed preference) being that a signup screen that doesn’t show me a peek preview of what I’m signing up for is off-putting