How I Alt Farcaster

• Supercast [link] by @woj.eth originally positioned as a Pro client, will pivot to mobile-first

• Wildcard [link] by @defikaran.eth and team as a tipping-friendly space, welcoming all users with innovative features to meet community demand

• Recaster [link] by @haole as a slick, mobile-native alternative to Warpcast. Broke its own record for new user logins last week [link]

• Herocast [link] by @hellno.eth and team as the relative old man in the room (it pre-dates channels!), building onward with unstoppable European pace and determination

• far.quest Pro [link] by @jc and @n as an 80k DAU client spanning the L1 (Optimism + Hubs) and its own L2 (multiple account choices + its own Superhub) [link]

• several that I haven't investigated, including Memecaster.lol [link] by @chriscocreated and Memecaster.co [link] (sic) by @memecaster.eth

Coming 🔜 for the general public:

• multiple Nouns-sponsored clients

+more niche use cases on the horizon:

• ΔＲＴＣΔ°ＳＴ by @oshi
• Artcoin by @pierrepauze and team
• Receipts.xyz by @vm and @steph

Some noteworthy client-adjacent projects, which have already demonstrated staying power:

• Buoy fixes search + notifications
• Crew for teams to share an account
• FarcasterStudio for growth stats
• Drakula for short-form video
• Unlonely for streaming
• Icebreaker for social attestations
• Interface for onchain activity notifications with native Farcaster account integration (@interface is sponsoring S02E06 of The BCBHShow)

And some multi-platform projects with significant Farcaster adoption:

• Yup
• Firefly
• Jam
• U3 (?)

The Merkle team considers it an existential issue [link] to get the default feed experience right, and is therefore willing to sacrifice a small number of long-time users (who would prefer to be given a choice of a reverse chron feed) [link], as well as non-English speaking users (especially from Asian countries) [link].

There are 3 viable choices of feed algo today, which may be considered too many to present to a normal user as a product-level decision.

1. Reverse Chron Feed: trivial to implement, but it puts the onus on the network to follow the right accounts as well as for accounts to cast the right kind of engaging content. If the network does not behave properly, the protocol's ongoing retention and network growth suffer.

It may be too difficult now for a new user to determine who to follow -- this was easier and more organic when the network was smaller and more homogenous.

It may be too difficult for a simple follow intent to distinguish content from an account that likes to participate in multiple conversations, e.g., politics, tipping, memecoins. (Channels was supposed to solve this. More below 👇)

2. OpenRank ForYou: the free algo methodology is public, but highly dependent on initial seed weights. Has only been made available to users via Supercast (paid subscription required) and The BCBHShow Lite Client 🌟 (FOSS, by me!)

The OpenRank algo relies on hard-to-game interactions to produce relevance scores, in the same spirit as how modern, pre-AI search engines such as Google were built successfully (c.f., PageRank). The ForYou algo highlights casts that should be engaging based on emergent relationships in the social graph. It solves the discovery problem of Reverse Chron Feed, at the cost of a dependency on initial seed weights, which may or may not be the ideal seed weights for every community's values. (To be fair, the importance of initial weights decays over time. Otherwise, the internet would not work.)

3. Channel feeds, with a variety of moderation choices

Casts in channels are self-categorized by the content creator, with various nudges from Warpcast. Once in a channel, the channel owner can (and almost always does) apply moderation, which currently follows an editorial curation model: a delegated moderator account (which may be human or bot or a bot representing a collection of humans). Only casts liked by that moderator account show up in the default Main feed; everything shows up in the Recent feed.

Personally, I like consumer choice. I flip back and forth between all the feed algos, using The BCBHShow Lite Client 🌟.

In feeds, I toggle between seeing all accounts, and only accounts I follow. In casts, I like to be shown how many Likes and Recasts come from accounts I follow (versus strangers+bots). I like to toggle whether I am shown the caster's username + PFP or not. I turn off embedded URLs (mostly images), and only allow images to assault my visual cortex after I explicitly click to reveal.

This is extreme.

Each setting is customizable, and it remembers your settings for next time.

I get fed the content in the way that I choose to be fed the content, with as little or as much context as I choose, and I interact with the Farcaster network with the specific UI that I prefer for each interaction:

The BCBHShow Lite Client 🌟

The official name of our show, The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show started as an in-joke between @christin and @artlu, since Christin had never watched The Beavis and Butt-Head Show and insisted that she would not become Butt-Head (the smart one).

Everyone asked us to change the name of the show to an easier name to remember. In classic artist-marketer tension, we found a passive-aggressive compromise to please no one: The BCBHShow (shortened to bcbhshow in our Farcaster account, ENS, and DNS). When I made the Lite Client, I lengthened it again by adding the The at the beginning and the 🌟 emoji at the end.

Artistic statement: it's vulnerable to create anything. Sometimes giving oneself permission to suck, can let one get over the initial hump of getting started. A wig takes care of the rest.

y0bcaster

The artist @y0b is an early user and supporter of the Lite Client. She said two memorable things in one of @stellabelle's FarHouse spaces [link]:

• she doesn't like being told what to do, so she scheduled her casts ahead of time in order to maintain her streaks

• she made an anti-fomo token called $ROBTL, the Relief of Being Too Late

y0b asked for help to remember the difficult URL https:// client-dash-bee-cee-bee-aych-show-dot-art-lu-dot-ex-why-zee. She asked me to purchase and deploy footgun.xyz. I did not, because y0b (with a zero instead of an Oh) is so much harder to type than yob or even yOb. Sorry not sorry.

And now y'all get to see y0b's PFP and feet pics before logging in.