“This post is taking part in the Farcaster 2026 writing contest”

Social media hasn’t always been soulless. Before everything turned into an engagement casino, there were very human elements to the major platforms of the day.

MySpace let you code your social page, Facebook was fun, Twitter had a town square vibe to it, and Instagram was reserved for the aesthetes.

Unfortunately, growth-at-all-costs mindsets poisoned these platforms, and they ultimately succumbed to the allure of mainstream appeal.

That’s why blockchain crypto web3 being onchain is exciting. It’s giving early internet days. Maybe the real number go up isn’t just daily active users (DAUs) but the quality of interactions and frens made along the way.

Farcaster has a steep hill to climb, for sure. It is increasingly clear that decentralisation for its own sake isn’t cutting it. But even with its decentralisation, openness and composability, Farcaster is not immune to the same trap as other social platforms.

Infinite-scroll addiction, optimising for ad revenue, and selling out identity for growth is the rule and not the exception these days. For Farcaster to scale without losing its soul, we must uncover the key ingredients to preserve along the journey to one million users.

The social media heyday was pre-2010, before things were overly commercialised.

Despite launching later, Discord has a comparable amount of users to Twitter. This is wild to me, considering that Twitter is infinitely easier to use. My belief is Discord preserved user agency rather than optimising for engagement. Features added along the way enhanced the degree of intimacy felt on the platform rather than detracting from it.

MySpace and Bebo had similar levels of personalisation and user agency, speaking to the nostalgia felt for these applications today. Facebook snuffed both out, capturing the world with novel features to become the omnipresent force it is today.

Competition would have been closer if Twitter didn’t take ten times as long as Instagram to acquire the same number of users. People clearly resonated more with visual storytelling.

Discord and Instagram leveraged emotional resonance amongst their users to great success, reaching similar levels of product market fit while deploying distinct engagement strategies.

Discord is the only application that received a ‘high+’ soul score for its community-driven engagement strategy, which is a feature that has been fortified and iterated on.

TikTok swoops in to steal the show with an outrageous DUG, but I was cautious not to award a ‘high+’ usability score, for addictiveness does not convert to usability.

Anecdotally, the biggest soul killer on social media is the block box around feed curation. Farcaster Frames is perfectly set up to introduce open source ranking to allow for more personalised discovery methods and thus better curated feeds.

One of the major issues plaguing social media is engagement farming through polarising. My background in public relations has taught me that clicks sell best when you present a divisive argument. This growth at all costs is doomed to be soulless.

Acquiring the right users in the right way, Farcaster should look to double down on highly aligned partnerships, hackathons and IRL onboarding events during 2025 and 2026. Show face at as many of the independently run ETH events as possible (see the global events circuit here), bringing in influential voices from the pocket communities in, seed quality content and own the onchain niche.

In this way, channels could be spun up for hackathons specifically and make for a massive onboarding opportunity guided by the Farcaster representatives.

Discord recreates the camaraderie typical of local area network (LAN) gaming sessions of old.

It’s this essence that lured so many onchain socialites to use the platform, gamifying life itself. Playing in the open world as digital nomads, LARPing to earn.

To get that work-to-play ratio right, the question isn't whether a platform can have a soul—it's whether it can nurture the soul of its users. After all, there’s no wrong way to use Discord.

Dune Analytics displays live onchain social data for Lens and Farcaster here. At the time of writing, the platforms barely have a hundred thousand daily active users (DAUs) between them.

While it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s not exactly screaming product market fit, particularly when we are talking about going for a billion.

Even more so when you hear people are crying out for alternatives. For example:

• Twitter users denounced the platform following Trump’s election, moving to Bluesky.

• TikTok refugees from the States scrambled for Rednote.

Why are both of these highly relevant but in different ways? I’m glad you asked, but we’ll get to that in just a sec. There are 560 million cryptocurrency users worldwide, so let’s assume that’s the total addressable market for onchain social. It’s not a billion, but it’s over halfway.

So far, social layers with blockchain integrations have reached as many as +20mm users (Avalanche), which is pretty good but doesn’t quite fit the mould we are looking for.

There have been similar integrations (Socrates, Frequency) where blockchain has been spoon-fed to millions. Organic, earned usage is rarer onchain. The only one I could find was ENS, launched in May 2017 and reaching one million domain owners in April 2024.

The opportunity for Farcaster again lies in the decentralised channels—akin to Discord channels—offering the added benefits of ownership, moderation incentives, and monetisation. Some Discord channels have millions of users, deeply engaged in whatever niche they so choose.

Farcaster channels could be the home for debate and encouragement for the next generation of builders.

Bluesky, as onchain decentralised social media launched in 2021 but only reached the public in February 2024, reporting a user base exceeding 7.6 million by September. This is good.

Despite slowing growth, the migration of users is hard to ignore. Approximately 10 million users migrated in the space of a month; that’s a DUG of 333,333. Huge! So, even though Twitter’s network effect is hard to beat, we can at least say that a significantly large number of people are willing to use alternative forms of social media; they just need a compelling reason to do so.

Resigning to the false narrative that people stick to what they know is defeatist. I enjoy the privilege of writing this article about onchain social media simply and only because people decided to do something different. Closer to the truth is that people don’t want the effort of platform-hopping for mildly distinct experiences.

This has to be the most comical bout of mass hysteria in human history (so far).

Corroborating the point on compelling motives to migrate, it took only two days for 700,000 users to reach Rednote. That DUG is 350,000.

That’s not why this one is important, though. This episode proved that nobody cares about privacy. Swathes of people announced their comfort in handing over personal data to China.

I bring this up because many onchain enthusiasts will endorse privacy in some shape or form. After all, it’s tantamount to “giving power back”. It’s just not the deciding factor for most people when choosing a social media platform.

Farcaster can stand out by competing on a different plane. TikTok’s discovery would be too hard to beat, but frames and channels provide enough curation control to do bizarre things. Incompatible with conventional social media. For example, I would love to see and participate in a Farcaster-based Zodiac Market Oracle that uses an AI Agent to track signs and planetary cycles, monitoring market fluctuations to deliver market insights as "astrological readings”.

This would not be positioned as investment advice (obviously) but rather as entertainment. An interactive way to engage in crypto bro science and astrological girl science.

Users cast daily horoscopes and track which signs have the best market calls. Someone, for the love of god, ship this!

Getting back to the question at hand: “How could Farcaster go big without losing its soul?”

Cracking one million users by the end of 2026 seems reasonable, but I’m not convinced that scale and soul are mutually exclusive. Discord proves that soul can scale, even with a chaotic user experience. The insight for Farcaster is to avoid enshittification:

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

Most popular platforms harvest data and optimise engagement at all costs. Every second away from your screen is potential revenue lost. It’s harm maximalism.

As touted by Cat McGee at ETH Dublin 2024, the redeeming quality of onchain UX/UI is that it’s fundamentally different. Trying to replicate the conventional social media experience with onchain socials sounds like enshittification to me.

Farcaster already feels like Twitter once onboarded, so maybe go no further with the similarities. Instead of replicating experiences people are familiar with, lean into the quirkiness of individual users that make each interaction special. Here’s how:

• Double down on channels – make them the social hubs for niche communities.

• Leverage IRL events – build social momentum through real-world gatherings.

• Encourage weird, new experiences – let users create things that couldn’t exist elsewhere.

That’s how Farcaster can go big without selling out. It’s not about clout, follower counts, or algorithmic feeds. The real number go up is the frens made along the way.