teddit

random observations: have noticed for a year+ that the behaviors / trends / content that do the best here track closest to early Facebook than to any other current platform (X, TikTok, Insta).

why?

i think there's an exhaustion with performative social and instead people crave low-stakes, casual spaces where they can share random thoughts and just connect. 

farcaster offers that to a lot of users today; the most common pieces of feedback:

- from the older generation, "it reminds me of the early internet"

- from the younger generation, "its for posting whatever is on my mind, which can be harder to do on other platforms. magic internet friends."

for the millennials, it offers a brand new network. they're not posting to friends or colleagues; they're posting to their followers most of whom they've never met before.

for college students, they never had a public digital space like Facebook. they only had instagram (performative feed) or snapchat (private messaging).

the other similarity with Facebook is that it had Facebook Platform: set of tools / product for third-party devs to create their own apps that could access data in Facebook (gifts, marketplace, events, video, games; honestly worth studying the history of Facebook Platform).

Great take

X has an unimpeachable moat around famous & powerful people. Bluesky is barely able to hang on this front, and it's mostly partisans who wanted to hedge (failing strategy)

If we can't win the global town square performers, why not double down on community -- appeal to the 99% that have no voice on X

friendly neighborhood shitcaster // working on @pinetree

*whispers* channels

Go after various niche communities that don't have a proper home on platforms like X, IG, etc.

/new-york 🗽 • /untzuntz 😈 • /tastebuds 🍕 Fan of eating tacos and bringing people together, often at the same time 🌮

2 years of channels and they have yet to drive growth.

Selling communities on a new tool doesn't work in practice. Even harder when the tool is bundled with a social network. Communities are downstream of the platform.

Because they don't know about it

I'm working on that :)

I know a lot of people on X who talk about house music yet they don't have a place online to "hang out", they just rely on the algo there to find each other which kinda sucks (and is hit or miss)