social

Startup artist seeking inspiration.  Champion of /bcard

good question. i think online social is one of the most powerful innovations we've come up with but is currently causing more harm than good. partly because the incentives of online social as we know it are misaligned and partly because we don't know how to deal with all the information we're consuming all the time

i'm trying to reconcile the potential for good that online social has, and similar to what you alluded to earlier, i think a lot of it lies in the networking part more than the platform/content part. the way that you foster the networking component is by listening and having conversations with people who are willing to listen

like counts and character limits don't feature in this vision. that's why irl meetups are the ideal fit, but critically they are limited to being in the same physical location as the people you would like to connect with

group chats and video calls are the online alternative but aren't great for discoverability

kinda feels like there's a middleground between the public feed and the private group chat that is underexplored. trying to imagine what that looks like

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context
https://farcaster.xyz/stephancill/0xf55b871c

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

I don't think it has to be that way, that's just a matter of norms. Some places are actively against traditional intros (eg. no talking about work).

Lots of space to experiment with bios or LLM intros if that's necessary but generally I'd lean on the side of letting mini cultures develop emergently, too.

Something I don’t like about the groups thing is the obligatory intros that you need to do every round. Might be interesting if an LLM could summarise what you’ve said in prior chats to skip this part

one category of ideas I had that is not covered here is more around building friendships around a shared context (imo best part of farcaster).

scenario: let's say people get shoved into 5 person groups for 1 week, discussions happen or not, if you do nothing you get shuffled to a fresh group next week, but if you like the group you can vote (pay a small amount?) to keep it.

the idea is to optimize people landing in groups that they want to keep and come back to.

also would be interesting to see what norms form, whether people do intros or have canned topics or discuss news etc, something about knowing you're stuck with these people for a week so may as well make the most of it.

I'm here to build global community. Artist, collector, father and husband, leftist, LGBTQ. Twitter @ OurCoOpFuture. pfp by Nilus Dantes. Creator of /solidarity

Well politics has been iterating on that channel for a long time but with farcaster not really doing much to support channels they're pivoting to Cura which has a FC client that's channel focused with more tools like being able to pin multiple conversation threads, curate and promote good discussion casts, things like that. And they started a book club with voice chats for deeper discussions. They've done things before like reward people who engage in dialogue in replies with degen tips but now they have their own token buster for it which can be portioned out through Cura for participation.

What politics channel is doing with Cura and the book club maybe fits in this line of thinking.

One idea I was always fascinated by are Twitch Raids. You have an audience and once in a while you all jump over to another streamer creating a lot of cross-pollination. And it's so much fun to see the reactions and appreciation for one another.