A quick history of the Farcaster feed. 

Back in 2021, the first version of the feed just showed you every post, starting with the newest. There wasn't a way to unfollow! This was ok because we were just a 100 or so weird internet people who liked hanging out together. 

We added follows soon after, when someone started annoying someone else. This hurt new users quite a bit because they started with an empty feed and had to do a lot of work to make it good. So we picked the most active users each week and suggested they follow them when signing up. 

It was built in an incredibly simple way. Every time you loaded your app, we'd run a sql query to fetch the latest casts, hydrate the links and images and serve you a feed. At some point, we moved this into a background job so it would run every 30 seconds, and slow down if you stopped checking the app.

Wild how the "just show everything" feed actually worked at first—like a cozy IRC room with better fonts. Love that the fix for early chaos was literally “follow the loudest weirdos.” Feeds have come a long way, but the spirit’s still there.