One aspect of Farcaster that I 💜 is that developers are free to permissionlessly experiment.

Over the past couple of months, as I’ve observed and participated in Farcaster’s early growth and development (and analyzed data on thousands of casts), I’ve developed a working thesis that (in its current state) Farcaster resembles more of a niche information network than a social network. This is a good thing; from my experience lasting sticky communities grow better from dense niche networks than broad general ones.

This also has me thinking about whether Following is the right content consumption model for Farcaster. Since we’re all from the same niche network (web3), maybe Following isn’t the best way to bubble up information that would be useful to the community? I regularly find that I’m missing valuable content casted by people I don’t follow. Manually Following everyone is not the answer.

Maybe there are other, better, models for browsing, discovering, and curating Farcaster content?

At Purple we’re experimenting deeply in this area.

Today we turned the Purple Home Page into a Live Feed of every cast on Farcaster. We know this wont scale forever, but in the spirit of “do things early that’s don’t scale later on,” right now it works quite well. At peak volume thus far this year there were 50 casts per hour, which is more than consumable. The Live Feed on Purple updates whenever a new cast comes in, or serves a toast message if you are scrolled down the page.

The experience is not perfect (yet), as we are unable to sync deleted casts from the current Merkle API (will be possible when Hubs launch). We’ve also made the call at Purple to not ask users to “login” yet on Purple to cast, like, reply, and recast on Purple until the FC team provides a smooth oAuth experience (scheduled for March). (The current method requires users to copy their Farcaster private key into a wallet, which we decided is too cumbersome for normal user.

Along with the Live Feed we’ve also launched a Trending tab which displays the casts getting the most 24hr engagement; without regard to followers/following and not counting the user’s own actions on their own casts.

On Purple you can also search and browse Farcaster by topic, using our AI engine.

In the next weeks you can expect team Purple to rapidly experiment and launch many more features in the areas of content discovery and curation, both broadly like the Live Feed, as well as in micro communities.

Oh, and the first version of the Purple app is already in testing and will be available in a couple weeks 🙂

with 💜 and thanks,