Data Analysis: Why Farcaster Ecosystem Continues to Be Popular

Author: Sid Shekhar, Coinbase researcher; Translation: 0xxz@金财经

We have seen an interesting phenomenon taking shape over the past few weeks.

The channel on Farcaster has become a central Schelling point for grassroots community formation. Over 43% of Farcaster account holders have never sent a cast. But of those who sent a cast, nearly 70% did so in a channel.

In this article, I analyze the channel’s open cast data and their usage to see what the data tells us.

The average number of channels a Farcaster user casts is ~8 channels!

While this number is significantly affected by users at the top of the user spectrum (such as the @degentokenbase bot replying in over 2,000 channels), this is still a Pretty big average!

Looking closer, I picked the top 15 channels with the most followers and found 7 that were "crypto native" and/or Farcaster related channels, and the other 8 are general unencrypted channels. Pretty balanced blend.

For users who post to multiple channels over time, how much overlap is there in their usage?

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Top 15 channels on Farcaster and their user overlap

A few things stand out. First, there are four core channels (/base, /degen, /farcaster, and /frames) with a large number of users posting in several of them. On the other hand, there are some extremely unrelated non-encrypted channels, such as /tabletop (tabletop gamers) and /front-end (front-end developers) that have their own subcommunities.

Users with high channel activity

If an average user posts in 8 channels , what is the actual distribution? The distribution is shown based on the number of channels posted by a user:

Understanding the cognitive choice of which channel to place a cast on is difficult (when the menu of choices is so large time), so it makes sense that 2-4 channels would be the largest distribution. It's similar to a restaurant buffet menu - you end up choosing the same few dishes in some of the grooves and comforts of custom.

What’s interesting, however:

21% of users don’t post on the channel at all ( Most of them are first-time casters),

Almost the same number of users (19%) are frequent channel actives (in more than 10 channels release).

Topic dispersion

So which channels get the most attention?

As we saw earlier, one way to classify channels is to split between "encrypted native" channels and more general channels -  The clustering is shown on the right side of the figure below.

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Farcaster channel (bigger bubbles mean more followers)

As an emerging feature of crypto-native channels on Farcaster, highly engaged sub-communities have organically emerged. From large channels like /degen and /nouns to several smaller channels that have popped up in the past few weeks - /higher, /sendit and the infamous /ticker --many have a name after them Memecoin or NFT collectibles come to the name of the collection.

While it’s difficult to see general non-crypto channels like /founders or /front-end coalescing around a token, it’s conceivable that the Farcaster network Every crypto-native channel on is associated with some kind of token or on-chain asset.

Reddit, Farcaster, and the road ahead

Last week, Reddit closed its doors with $7 billion The valuation comes after the IPO - 19 years after its founding and millions of users and posts. For a certain segment of the Internet, Reddit is their de facto "home page of the Internet" - a central hub for a wide range of content provided and curated by its users - including news, discussion, opinion, and entertainment. The similarities between Reddit and Farcaster have been widely documented.

How do subreddits compare to the Farcaster theme space?

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subreddits (bigger bubbles mean more subscribers)

In addition to r/funny standing out above the rest, you can see a wide range of general topics with all 20M-30M subscribers on the spectrum -  Many of them gained initial attention because users automatically subscribed to them when they joined Reddit.

Channels on Farcaster were originally described as a "decentralized subreddit" when it first launched last year. To someone starting out with Farcaster, the entire platform will look and feel like one large cryptocurrency subreddit. However, as the network grows, it will be interesting to see the growth of new channels, both on “crypto-native” topics and on more obviously general topics.

Reddit has over 100,000 subreddits and Farcaster has nearly 5,000 channels, and some topics (such as "memes") have large communities on both .

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Farcaster channel (left) and Reddit subreddit (right)

< p style="text-align: left;">As Farcaster matures, and the selection of full-featured clients (not just limited to Warpcast) increases, it will be interesting to see which path becomes more dominant -  ;a network of specialized, crypto-native sub-communities or a more general Reddit-like general channel with broader appeal.

Channels, including how they are moderated and managed (via channel passes), and the communities that form around them, will play a huge role in shaping the future direction and identity of the web. crucial role. As users continue to move in and out of different channels, they will collectively determine the types of communities and conversations that define the Farcaster experience.