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?

Warpcast

Pi-chi.eth (she/her) Artist /animeoutcasts
Hosting: /sakura /kyoto /momiji  /anime-manga /farcasterunion

https://portrait.so/pichi

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