Original Author: Sid Shekhar

Original Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Reactions on Farcaster in the past week

Cryptocurrency has always been a community movement. The community defines the meaning in this industry - whether it's Bitcoin being seen as a meme for hard assets or NFT projects being hailed as the next global IP after Pokémon and Barbie.

The communities formed around these assets come together with shared focal points of interest, creating vibrant, albeit temporary, ecosystems. These formations, although fascinating, often face inevitable challenges of interest shifts, declining participation, and loss of attention.

The fleeting nature of attention within these groups highlights a significant challenge: how to maintain long-term engagement.

How does Farcaster maintain people's participation?

Farcaster now has over 200,000 users, and interestingly, even though there has been a hockey stick growth under the influence of the Frame frenzy this month, the daily number of posts and engagement has not significantly decreased. Cryptocurrency applications typically operate with profit in mind (users striving for the next 10x or airdrop), but Farcaster has a different "vibe."

I delved into the open-source release data to quantify what and who drives this vibe. Here are some of my favorite Farcaster "character portraits" (with some interesting statistical data):

Inquirers

Almost 38% of those who participated in voting have asked questions online. These questions aren't ordinary questions; they're often thought-provoking questions. Essentially, users are interested in others' opinions and invite them into conversations. In terms of quantity, there were nearly 400,000 posts containing questions, accounting for about 6% of all posts!

Selected questions from the Philosophy channel

The above image is a selection of questions from the philosophy channel.

Responders

In line with the spirit of replyguys, 64% of the posts on Farcaster are replies. When grouping users based on their number of replies, most users seem to be frequent responders (as shown in the image below), with some extreme responders having replied thousands of times (in just a few weeks of activity).

Long-form content is popular

We know that the publishers are avid book readers. It turns out that the entire network also likes long-form writing in posts. Data shows a significant correlation between post length and user engagement: longer posts tend to receive more likes and shares. Although there is typically a limit of 320 characters per post, the data tells us that depth and detail resonate more with the Farcaster audience.

Tippers

Last week, a friend and I decided to connect to the real-time feed of Farcaster Hub. After running it for a while, we realized that most of our screens were filled with $DEGEN.

From Farcaster Hub to GRPC real-time sources

So far, the most used term on Farcaster is $DEGEN, as the primary currency for tipping (users can reply to a post with a number and $DEGEN to tip the author). While projects like Steemit have had some success with tipping small amounts for posts, tipping on social media content has yet to be fully explored and successful at a large scale.

Some high-level statistics about this phenomenon:

Over 37,000 users have tipped in $DEGEN at one point in time, with $DEGEN being included in nearly 16% of the tips.

Builder

Lastly, let's talk about the gorilla in the room. The launch of Frames and the frame-ification of NFT minting, applications, games, etc., unlock a multitude of creative and exciting experiences for users and developers on the Feed. Not only has the number of releases with Frames increased significantly this year (as seen in the following sections), but in 2024, Frame releases accounted for nearly 22% of the total likes on Farcaster.

Source: https://frames.spindl.xyz/

Key points

a) In this stage of growth, maintaining Farcaster engagement is a core culture where people generously share their questions, answers, likes, tips, and ideas. Deep engagement > surface-level engagement.

b) The underlying protocols and their social graphs are open and analyzable, which is great.

I might delve deeper into studying more data like this, including the evolving channel patterns and how niche communities start merging and developing.