Make Channels Great Again: A Thread
First of all, I would like to congratulate
@rish and the gang at
@neynar for becoming the new lead developers of the Farcaster protocol. It was clear that the current trajectory was not working and it was time to switch things up a bit. I have every confidence that the new team will steer the protocol towards a bright and successful future.
I would also like to express my gratitude to
@dwr and his team for building this protocol to begin with and for making it what it is today. Granted, there are a lot of decisions and viewpoints of Dan's that I simply did not agree with, but if it wasn't for his tenacity, vision, and determination, we wouldn't have the thriving and passionate community that we do now, even in the midst of hard times. Ultimately, he made the right call in passing the torch. I wish both Dan and his other team members the best in their future endeavors.
With that out of the way, I'm making this cast, posted on
@sopha, in attempts to persuade rish and his fellow developers to reconsider the potential of channels. Channels were introduced a couple years ago to the protocol as a way for casters to find and post about very specific topics as opposed to casting to the main timeline. In the beginning, these were conceived as essentially hashtags, but there were many promises made by the team that the channel feature would be expanded upon and would eventually be moved to the chain.
It was around this time that I,
@earth2travis,
@borrowlucid.eth, and a few other fellow casters embarked on what would be know as the Farcastle project (not to be confused with Farcastles, another project entirely). It was actually from Farcastle that I got my current persona, Father (now Dreadlord) Morwen. The idea of the project was to transform channels into full-on DAOs. All of the infrastructure was there for it to happen: channels, crypto integration, and miniapps to provide tools for voting, governance, treasury, and so on. On top of that, these DAOs would have the strength and blessing of a network of innovators, builders, and thinkers to help these organizations thrive. All that needed to be done was for the development team to move channels on-chain and our goals of bringing proper DAOs to Farcaster would become a reality.
Ultimately, this promise was never fulfilled. The channel feature was abandoned under the perception that it wasn't driving enough user growth. Channels were never given the opportunity to grow and have since then stagnated. The Farcastle project has since then become inactive.
With a new crew at the helm, I urge them to consider the original vision of channels (which I'll be referring to as channel-DAOs from here) and how expanding upon this vision can not only drive greater user growth but could allow Farcaster to stand out amongst other decentralized social protocols as a web3 powerhouse. To explain how on-chain channel-DAOs could drive Future growth and success, I want to focus on three main pillars of potential that channel-DAOS could unlock:
1. Culture
2. Utility
3. Capital
I'll be going through each of these in turn as each pillar builds and capitalizes upon the other: