Farcaster isn’t just another Twitter alternative. It’s an open protocol. That means you can do more than post: you can own your identity, reach your audience directly, and experiment with new forms of media and interaction that aren’t possible elsewhere.

As cohosts of Farcaster's longest running and number one podcast, GM Farcaster, Nounish Prof and I have been at the forefront of this shift. We’ve built a Farcaster-native media brand from the ground up, with live shows, podcasts, newsletters, community events, and an AI assistant—all integrated with the Farcaster protocol.

This playbook is open-source and based on everything we’ve learned since launching our media business on Farcaster in 2023. Farcaster has been an incredible place to grow both audience and community, and we’d love to see more media brands lean into this growing ecosystem. We’ve found success with tools like NFT mints, AI bots, and MiniApps, and we hope this guide helps you try them too.

The four primary building blocks we’ve found effective for establishing a media presence on Farcaster are channels, group chats, mini apps, and AI bots. Together, they form a lightweight but powerful foundation: a place to gather and connect with your community, a way to showcase your content inside the feed, and a smart assistant to help people explore everything you’ve made.

Think of a channel like a subreddit or hashtag you control. Channels create a dedicated space in Farcaster where you can post your updates, where your community can find you and get some basic information, and where anyone can indicate they're talking about your brand.

For GM Farcaster, we used our channel as the central hub for our show, the way traditional companies use websites. In fact, we used our channel as our "home page" long before we even had a website.

In this screenshot of our /gmfarcaster channel, you can see a few features of channels:

• Name & Description - Establish your brand presence

• Follower counts - People can follow channels the way they follow accounts. We have 17k followers for the GM Farcaster channel.

• External links - You can easily link to your podcast or newsletter or website for people to learn more

• Membership - You can set up membership to limit who can post to your channel

Today’s media companies understand that a smaller but active community can be more valuable than a larger but passive audience. Farcaster supports private group chats - dedicated spaces where your most engaged followers can connect directly with you and with each other.

We use our GM Farcaster group chat to share previews of what we’re working on and to gather early feedback from our most loyal listeners.

MiniApps (formerly known as Farcaster Frames) are lightweight web apps that run directly inside the Farcaster feed, on both mobile and web. They feel like native apps but are just regular websites, so you can launch quickly without worrying about app store approvals.

Because MiniApps live inside the social feed, usage is almost always higher than standalone apps. Users can interact with your content without leaving Farcaster, and when they engage (watching, collecting, commenting) it happens in public, where others can see and join in. That’s where network effects kick in.

Every media company should consider launching a MiniApp. Why? Because the hardest part of running a show or newsletter is getting people to come back. Subscriptions help, but we’ve all seen what happens when Gmail tosses your email into the “Promotions” tab. A MiniApp gives you a direct line to your audience.

When someone saves your MiniApp to their favorites, you can send them push notifications. That means you can tell fans when you’ve released a new episode or published a newsletter, without relying on third-party algorithms or email filters. (But of course, be careful and don't abuse it, or people will disable alerts or remove your MiniApp.)

We built a MiniApp for GM Farcaster so users could watch our live stream without leaving Farcaster. When someone is scrolling the feed, they don’t want to jump to YouTube or Spotify. Now, every time we go live, we send a push notification, and fans can watch the show right inside of Farcaster.

We also added a “Cast that you're watching” share button to the MiniApp that encourages users to cast about our show to their followers, further amplifying the episode to others on Farcaster and drives more views, more discussion, and more community engagement.

Farcaster is a social network, which means everything happens in the feed. Users post casts, reply to others, and all of it is public and searchable.

So what if your brand could be part of that conversation—literally?

That’s where an AI Assistant comes in. Instead of thinking of it like a chatbot hidden on a website, think of it as a Farcaster user in its own right: replying to posts, answering questions, and surfacing content from your back catalog at the right moment.

For GM Farcaster, we built an AI bot called GMFC101. It looks like any other Farcaster user, but behind the scenes, it has access to transcripts from 300+ episodes of our show. It can help new users learn how to use Farcaster or point longtime fans to past discussions on specific topics. It lives in the feed, participates in real conversations, and is always on-brand.

It’s also open source. You can find the code here: github.com/atenger/Farcaster-101-API (Apache-2.0 licensed), and I wrote a detailed walkthrough of how I built it: How I Built GMFC101.

That’s what an AI Assistant solves. It unlocks your full catalog and makes it interactive, discoverable, and shareable—right where your community already is.

Beyond the core playbook items above, Farcaster is made of legos, and that’s where the fun begins. These additional tools can be used to increase your brand presence and build deeper connections with your audience. Using crypto-native tools signals that your brand is aligned with the values of the Farcaster ecosystem: openness, experimentation, and community-driven growth.

Paragraph.xyz - Syndicate newsletters directly to Farcaster
Users can read your posts in the Paragraph miniapp without leaving the feed, and subscribers get push notifications when you publish. It’s like Substack, but crypto-native.

Ponder - Create native polls inside the Farcaster feed
Ask your audience things like “Which topic should we cover next?” or “What’s your favorite episode so far?” Polls are a great way to boost interaction and crowdsource ideas in public.

Buoy - Real time keyword alerts
Set up real-time alerts whenever someone mentions your brand on Farcaster. It's a powerful social listening tool to track keyword mentions and stay in tune with the conversation about your content.

Pods.media - Host Your Podcast Onchain
With Pods, you can publish your podcast episodes onchain, letting users listen, mint, and collect them as NFTs. It creates a permanent record of your work and lets your audience own a piece of it. We’ve been using Pods since Season 3 of GM Farcaster to make our episodes more discoverable and collectible in the crypto-native world.

Zora, Highlight, Rodeo - Mint Media That Matters
These platforms let you mint full episodes, clips, artwork, newsletters, or one-off moments and share them on Farcaster. At GM Farcaster, we’ve experimented with all of them - from minting sponsor receipts to posting clips. Each platform offers different mechanics, and trying them helps you understand how your audience wants to engage.

Clanker - Launch a Meme Coin
Clanker lets anyone create a meme coin in seconds using nothing more than a cast. It’s a Farcaster-native tool that turns community memes into shareable, tradable assets. We launched $CastOut using Clanker during our CastOut competition. It’s playful, sticky, and a great way to gamify participation.

Hyersub - Build Memberships Onchain
Hypersub is a protocol for onchain memberships, similar to Patreon or NPR’s supporter model. You can offer perks like bonus content, early access, or shoutouts to fans who subscribe. We've had success with our GM Farcaster hypersub which allows people to directly support us and take advantage of membership benefits and perks.

Farcaster is still early. Farcaster users are curious, engaged, playful, and global. They don’t just consume media passively, they build with you, remix your memes, show up live, and give feedback that actually helps.

We’ve seen this firsthand at GM Farcaster:

• Our community consistently joins live episodes and participates in the chat.

• Livestream viewership jumped ~25% after we launched our MiniApp.

• Our AI assistant has become a go-to for onboarding and content discovery.

• Our Hypersub members actively help us shape the show.

If you’re looking to build not just an audience, but a community, Farcaster offers the most direct, flexible, and creator-friendly rails on the internet today.

We pioneered this model with GM Farcaster, and would love to see more media brands take the leap and join us on this sufficiently decentralized social network.

Now’s the time to get in early, grow with the network, and build a trusted presence while attention is still easy to earn. As Farcaster expands, early media brands will benefit from credibility, community, and momentum that’s hard to replicate later.

If you want to:

• Launch a channel

• Build a miniapp

• Set up a meme coin or AI bot

• Mint media onchain

• Or just understand what’s possible...

Start experimenting with the four building blocks in this playbook, try the tools we recommended, and let us know how it goes!