Farcaster's Locust Plague

Farcaster's Locust Plague, and what's next for our favorite social network.

Here's the thing: Everyone and their dog took to blogging platforms when last week's Dune Analytics numbers came in, making it obvious that Farcaster DAU growth was spiking.

If you were on Kiwi News during that period, you know that we curated about ten to twenty posts on the topic, all varying in their speculation on what spurred the growth and what made this time special.

But today, the music has stopped, and the lights are coming on. The party is basically over... for now...

For me, as the founder of that other social media site, quite frankly, I've already stopped caring about the supposed reasons for why Farcaster went viral. I've read all your posts, yes. But rather, I want to understand what will happen next.

While yes, there may be some increased engagement still sloshing around the system, looking at the Dune charts curated by Pixel, the number of onboarding users has peaked already on February fifth, and so with Warpcast potentially having a rather high churn rate after a user's first few days or weeks, we should see some significant drop or regression to a mean in the daily active user graph. It has held up so far, but remember that growth happens when you are onboarding more users than there are churning, which tends to become quite difficult with absolute numbers of to-be-onboarded users increasing absolutely.

So what is next? In my opinion, it's fair to say that Farcaster essentially onboarded the entire Ethereum-aligned crypto space in those last few weeks with all the big publications running stories.

Dan's idea is to make Warpcast compelling to users with deep interests, and so he promoted the app on Bankless as a replacement for Reddit - so it's essentially a great place for finding like-minded people and their content.

Additionally, there's the direct messenger, which increases the app's potential too and can pull over Discord and Telegram users eventually. The bull market has recently also picked up steam, and so besides ultra Ethereum-aligned bear market survivors, what if retail starts onboarding next? All of this, however, is suspiciously optimistic to the point where I tend to want to base myself in more pessimistic realism.

Qualitatively, the hype around Farcaster was a combination of nicely executed features added to the app and the DEGEN memecoin launch, which motivated tons of airdrop farmers (inhere called "the Locust Plague") to doomscroll the feed. In that scenario, revisiting our original idea of retail onboarding the app next seems delusional at best.

So, while I do think that "retail" is eventually coming to enter the Farcaster arches, I think we'll have to have a round of consolidation first. A lot of dust has been kicked up. Entire years' worth of crops of "Farcaster culture" have been trampled over and forgotten. So, while growth can happen at the expense of sustainability, it probably shouldn't.

Here's the good thing, though: The plague has probably already moved on, and those who remain stayed for the community's fruit - which should be a great source of prosperity for all who built on Farcaster before it was cool.