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

bringing in a community together. they stick around for each other

I agree with @dwr.eth that it's hard to wholesale import communities -- real communities don't work that way unless they're coerced or refugees

You have to appeal to a few open-minded members with clout who then advocate internally for a change

we have pioneers here already. at this point you're distinguishing between the spanish conquistador model vs. english settler model, and one seems to have historically worked better than the other.

plus, the settler model has worked well for many social platforms:

gaming groups on TeamSpeak → Discord
company teams on email → Slack
friend/family groups on sms → WhatsApp
twitter communities → Mastodon
Digg communities → Reddit
WhatsApp groups → Telegram
mailing lists → Facebook groups
Slack communities → Discord
forums → Reddit
Vine → TikTok
Tumblr → Twitter/Mastodon
MySpace music communities → SoundCloud

> we have pioneers here already. at this point you're distinguishing between the spanish conquistador model vs. english settler model, and one seems to have historically worked better than the other.

I don't think I implied Spanish model. Pioneers are the first to arrive, settlers build the communities. 

We've had some convert, but there's not a steady of stream of people who want to join.

Most of your examples are at best weak versions of social networks and more tools. We're competing with feed-based apps with public profiles and messaging, so X, IG, TikTok.

if those aren't good examples of historical migrations of social groups to a new platform, can you give some examples you're hoping to emulate?

Groups don't migrate to social networks. Individuals do and then spread word of mouth to other individuals. New groups form on the social network. Bluesky is the only example I can think of and that was because of an outlier event.

You have to have a compelling reason to join a social network, i.e. someone says to you "are on you on [blank]? you have to get on there it's amazing for [blank]"

I just gave a bunch of examples of social platforms that onboarded groups. all the other social platforms succeeded because they were fundamentally new

> i don't understand what an alternative strategy is. onboarding groups seems most obvious.

...but no feed-based social networks in the last 10 years have successfully onboarded groups as a growth strategy.

:)

everyone who has been here for years has tried to get friends to join with low levels of success. farcaster isn't a fundamentally new experience, but it does offer certain groups of people a much better social experience.

i don't understand what an alternative strategy is. onboarding groups seems most obvious. if you have examples of other strategies that farcaster is emulating, i'd love to know what i'm overlooking

With the exception of TikTok (unique growth strategy), all of your examples are >10 years old. Social is more competitive now, no clear low hanging fruit. 

Again, Bluesky is the closest to new at-scale social network, but tbd