Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Truly remarkable how despite steady growth Farcaster always gets left out of commentary like this. There is a genuine parallel universe invisibility effect beyond the cryptowall. I don’t think this is a problem to be solved. Rather, it’s a regime boundary to be respected and understood. Just as you think of your insurance spending and regular consumption spending in separate buckets, your social media attention budget has separate buckets. Your financial budget has buckets: Tax, retirement savings (including equity part of mortgage), insurance, emergency liquidity, and consumption. Your attention budget has analogous buckets. Tax = news. Retirement savings = learning. Insurance = Censorship resistant media use. Emergency liquidity = email/slack/zoom other work channels. Consumption = regular infotainment media, including social.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Mood affiliation. All crypto bad.
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Laurens
@laurens
dont think its only that. i keep a pretty close tabs on different communities in the ecosystems for my writing. the type of crypto positive people that i do see (some on bsky, lots on nostr) is that its the type that is very distrustful of anything that reeks too much of centralisation
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Hmm, I've been following Farcaster mentions on both platforms for years and most common response on both platforms to any mention of Farcaster is that it's inherently scammy (Bsky because cryptocurrency, Nostr because non-Bitcoin).
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
That's your problem. You're following the *mentions*
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Not really. If you search Farcaster on BlueSky or Nostr, there's a small percent of open-minded people discussing (often Farcaster users using the other platforms) and the replies, esp. for larger accounts are almost always universally negative. fwiw, I do this for Twitter as well. Sentiment for crypto twitter people not active on farcaster today is almost as negative (and they are crypto people). Bsky last fundraise pitch deck thew shade at Farcaster (from what I've heard).
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
You’re not getting my point My point is it’s usually not even in the conversation when social media broadly is being discussed. Neither is Nostr. There are a million conversations that go something like “which is best alt to twitter? Mastodon, threads, or bluesky?” Even substack is more likely to be included in the set. I think it’s fine to not be in those conversations because I don’t think farcaster is social media per se. It’s not in that set. But others might think it ought to be.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
In fact I bet you farcaster lags very significantly, in the brand-recognition to user base fraction. Not counting bots. Ie a lot of people who don’t use anything other than twitter still know about threads and mastodon. They haven’t heard of farcaster. The brand hasn’t crossed over to general awareness. It isn’t being held back by crypto negativity, The crypto negativity might kick in *after* you explain what it even is.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Conversation is going fractal (so will reference my initial response below). imo, there's minimal value prop for a non-crypto person to use Farcaster today (outside of knowing someone personally who is very active on Farcaster). The awareness for Twitter alternatives is a result of competing for the users that wanted to flee Elon. I don't think that's particularly valuable to build a foundation on (and potentially a net negative because based on being anti something vs. pro something). The most likely outcome imo for Twitter alternatives: X is right wing (and people too lazy to switch / big existing audiences) and Threads is left wing. Challenge for all will be monetization (but if Threads is extension of Instagram then probably fine). Sub-scale Twitter-style networks are not good businesses. https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x7c2d504a
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