Listen, everyone is a critic and a Monday morning quarterback but I feel like channels were such a big missed opportunity for Farcaster. For the protocol and the client. Under-invested and not explored nearly long enough to definitively say they wouldn’t grow DAU, imo.

Writer. Head of Product @ Stablecore. Working on simple web hosting https://orbiter.host \ https://polluterofminds.com

Personally if I was engineering farcaster, I would add a way to do metadata topics on casts. I don't want channels, but a way to signal and help other devs organize casts sort of like RSS.

I still predict AI and other stats will help organize and surface casts for clients, but without some kind of native tagging this is much harder.

Maybe we need to bring back hashtags?

Defi. Ethereum. Physics.

Data at @quotient.

True but this is a problem that I believe AI, social signals, and clients can abstract away.

The client could technically remove the  hashtag, then organize topics via the hashtag. Then you can use profile scoring to surface high signal users over spam.

As soon as I started reading your comment, I thought of hashtags. Maybe this is just an aesthetics thing, but I hate hashtags. I hate searching by them in Bluesky and Twitter. Threads has obfuscated them to the point where they feel more like channels