Let's continue building our village!

With Farcaster recently adding channels and hence increasing its daily active users, posting to it has changed.

While it made me feel like a micro-celebrity back in February posting Kiwi-eating pictures at ETHDenver - today, Farcaster feels more anonymous. It's not as anonymous as Twitter, more like the anonymity of a big city.

I'm not mad at this; for growth's sake, it was bound to happen. Many people will like Farcaster more now - as opposed to me now liking it a bit less. But the Farcaster team is proud of hitting their growth targets, and I respect them for that.

But this post isn't about Farcaster; it's about Kiwi News and what kind of development strategy I want to propose for it in light of FC's growth:

"Let's continue building our village!"

With Kiwi News having yet again received ~2000 USD this month from donations and sales (thank you!), keeping our operational costs at a minimum, and not having raised venture capital - it is our dream to continue bootstrapping this small village on the web.

With FC being funded by a16z and Dan's goal to reach 1B DAU, Farcaster is on the path of growth (which is great because it removes power from centralized X servers).

But for us at Kiwi, not needing to pay back VCs - I think we now have an extraordinary chance to build something equitable and new.

With the last weeks showing us that we may be default alive, I'm dreaming about building a "multinational, small business," and I'm convinced that mixing independence, serving our paying customers and that being credibly neutral are the core pillars of a trustworthy media site post-2023.

Farcaster's DAU growth is nonetheless humbling as fuck, especially regarding our own recently stagnating DAU growth.

But I'm not pessimistic, and while we continue to struggle to make ends meet - and probably will for a while - I'm writing here to convince myself that keeping going is essential to having the market confirm our conviction later.

I think we now have the chance to create a cozy and sustainable niche link aggregator that allows us to self-determine our future growth targets without resorting to outrage tactics to increase engagement (looking at you, X).

So while our DAUs are ⬇️, I'm confident that we must continue to build, for we will see a few more passerbys and settlers soon enough!