@pichi

When I originally made my channels, it said I would have to pay to renew them and I was okay with that. But that day never came and we’ve been able to keep channels indefinitely. If I had to pay again, I probably wouldn’t renew most of them and would strongly debate why I would renew any. I used to use channels to organize content. It made some things easy to find when search was unusable. Now I’ve come to terms with the fact that casts are ephemeral. I was trying to work around system limits using channels. I used to use them because people scrolled them and I kept them curated so they looked nice. The main Farcaster client stopped highlighting channels and made them more difficult to scroll so most people stopped checking them. As soon as I lost the purple dot notifications that there were new posts, even I forgot to check most of them. I’ve seen a handful of communities continue to thrive after the channels overhaul, but I’ve lost most of the tools I used to use because developers moved on or pivoted or sunsetted the products. Channels went into zombie mode, the network changed, and now we all feel stuck. The channel membership models were designed to combat spam. If your channel had spam, it was your fault. Most of us locked them down because we had no choice. We had no moderation tools built into the client and had to rely on third party solutions. Now, spam is much much better. Spammers don’t target channels as much. Maybe we don’t really need that model at all anymore. Are there exceptions? Sure. Channel gates can be very useful for some communities, but do 99% of channels need them now? Probably not.

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