Onchain Social Growth Metrics Update - May 2024

Hey There! Are you ready to look at some onchain social growth metrics?

First, I must start with a disclaimer. This initial onchain social growth metrics update is a scaled down version of what I plan to publish in the future.

It’s just a taste of what’s to come.

I’m still in the process of finding clean and accurate data sources for ALL the various onchain social protocols and apps so this report is going to be a little rough around the edges.

I’m looking to get feedback from my subscribers, users of the different onchain social platforms and from the people building these platforms.

This is meant to be conversation starter around the topic of onchain social analytics and user growth data.

For now, I’m only going to review Farcaster, DeSo Protocol and Lens Protocol.

Over time I plan to analyze metrics for the full list of onchain social platforms in my Onchain Social Landscape Map (coming soon).

There may be as many as 20 platforms I could analyze already.

The goal is to publish a report like this on a monthly basis so if you haven’t already subscribe to the Onchain Creators newsletter, please do that now.

As a subscriber you’ll get this delivered to your inbox automatically on the 2nd Saturday every month.

Ok, let’s dive into the data!

Farcaster

First off, Farcaster user growth metrics ripping and it’s up only.

Seriously, Farcaster is on fire!🔥

Fresh off the Farcon (community conference) in May, this web3 social network is starting to gain serious traction.

Although, I would like to point out that Farcaster is not a fully decentralized or fully onchain social network, but they also don’t claim to be and that’s ok.

Farcaster founder, Dan Romero has said before, it’s “sufficiently decentralized”.

It’s a topic of discussion for another post, but I digress.

Looking Farcaster.Network, I can see the onchain social platform has about 350k total users now with about 40k of them being daily active users (DAUs).

This is obviously a tiny number compared to traditional social networks like X, which sees 260m DAUs, but still impressive in the onchain social world.

Farcaster’s user growth is up 21x so far in 2024 while total protocol revenue to date surpassed $1.25m in May. Quite impressive growth, I must say.

As you can see in the chart above, Farcaster engagement is also up significantly. Casts (posts), reactions and link volume now top 7m.

I’ve been on Farcaster since early 2023, but just started spending more time engaging on the platform over the past 2 months.

An interesting thing I’ve noticed about Farcaster so far is the number of high-quality users actively engaging on the platform including many notable web3 founders and builders (mostly Ethereum-centric).

I’ve seen Ethereum creator, Vitalik Buterin and Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase posting on the platform.

It makes sense. The Farcaster founder is a former Coinbase executive and Coinbase Ventures is a Farcaster investor.

I use Farcaster through the Warpcast client and recently had fun minting the Onchain Social Summer NFT on Zora which I then shared to Farcaster.

Below is a list of the Top Onchain Creators on Farcaster as of May 9, 2024.

Data Sources : Farcaster.Network, Dune Analytics

Shot out to @pixelhack on Dune for the awesome Farcaster charts!

DeSo Protocol

Next up is DeSo Protocol.

I’ve been a huge fan and user of DeSo going back it’s Bitclout days in 2021.

(Side note: Coinbase Ventures also invested in DeSo)

Since rebranding, DeSo has come a long way and is now a fully decentralized Layer 1 blockchain, purpose-build to support infinite state social media apps.

The platform recently launched it’s Revolution Proof-of-Stake testnet (2 years in the making) with mainnet expected to go live by June 2024.

DeSo will also soon launch Focus (a Twitter like app that raised $80m in Q1 2024). The Focus onboarding incentive program and social airdrop looks like it could lead to a major pick up in user growth metrics.

DeSo user growth and platform metrics have been low while the team was head down building Focus and Revolution PoS among other things.

Still, DeSo sports impressive growth metrics despite spending almost no money on marketing for months. It’s been almost entirely organic growth.

Over the past 30 days, DeSo had about 326k monthly active users (MAUs), but daily active users (DAUs) currently stands at about 11.6k.

Historically, DeSo has seen waves of growth that stall out, but I’m excited to see what happens when Focus launches.

To date, DeSo has seen over 7.8k blog posts, 5.5m content posts and 6.4 million comments from it’s users.

From a new user perspective, I personally found DeSo to have a better engagement rate than Farcaster. When you create an account and start posting content for the first time (at least for me), my content got noticed and engaged with amore than the same content posted on Farcaster.

However, I do need to test a wider variety of content on both networks. I’ll share more stats related to engagement in my next monthly update.

Unfortunately, there’s was no Dune-like dashboard for DeSo similar to the one I found for Farcaster.

Aside from DeSo Explorer (built by the DeSo core team), the only other onchain social analytics tool for DeSo metrics is Altumbase, which only shows daily snapshot metrics

(disclosure: I’m an investor in Altumbase via Openfund as well as the $DESO protocol token and $FOCUS)

Below is a list of the Top Onchain Creators on DeSo as of May 9, 2024.

Lens Protocol

Last, but not least, we have Lens Protocol.

I was a big fan of Lens Protocol early on. I signed their open letter onchain (pre platform launch) in January 2022.

Unfortunately, I signed that letter and created my Lens handle using a company name that I’m no longer involved with… and it sucks you can’t change lens handle names once they’re minted.

I then tried for 18 months get an invite to create a personal profile with no luck. In early 2024, Lens opened up to the public and I was finally able to create my personal account which you can see at hey.xyz/u/ryancharleston.

It’s kind of funny. Take a look at the chart below of new Lens profiles created per day and see if you can tell when Lens opened its platform to the public.

Growth metrics for Lens Protocol on Dune Analytics were hard to find and nothing I found made me feel confident that the numbers were accurate.

A couple dashboards I found were not updated with recent data so I did not use them.

The dashboard snapshot below shows the total number of Lens users nearing 380k with daily active users (DAUs) hovering around 1k.

That seems really low, so I’m skeptical.

Another article I found reported Lens had 3,000 DAUs in June, 2023, which does match the Dune chart above. So, maybe it is accurate.

Personally, I have not had the chance to use Lens much, but I will continue to post content on the network, engage with people and monitor it’s progress.

To sum things up. We’re still very early with onchain social media.

It will be interesting to see how these networks grow.

If you or someone you know has suggestions regarding data sources and/or tools available to get onchain social data, please to reach out.

Before I publish the next metrics report, I will publish the Onchain Social Landscape - a visual of all the onchain social protocols and apps I would like to analyze user growth metrics for in the future.

That’s it for now.

Did you enjoy this post and was it valuable? If you have any comments, suggestions or ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Let’s connect and I’ll see you onchain.

Cheers!

Ryan

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