# @v: A quick history of the Farcaster feed

Source: https://farcaster.xyz/v/0x694133db
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/v-A-quick-history-of-the-Farcaster-feed?index=0x685e3863da5c707d34eaf161b7c215c2f7071d07d4e4dc7b98b00b5faa54939de599b2a2
Submitted by @timdaub.eth on 2025-06-27 UTC, 4 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

Vitalik-style author? No, the post is by "@v" per the title, and the article is a short first-person history of Farcaster's feed. The article says the first feed in 2021 showed every post from newest to oldest with no way to unfollow, which was acceptable when the network had about 100 users. Follows were added soon after, and because new users started with an empty feed, the team picked the most active users each week and suggested that new signups follow them. The feed was first built as a SQL query run on each app load to fetch the latest casts and hydrate links and images, and was later moved to a background job that refreshed every 30 seconds and slowed down when users stopped checking the app.

## Article

A quick history of the Farcaster feed. 

Back in 2021, the first version of the feed just showed you every post, starting with the newest. There wasn't a way to unfollow! This was ok because we were just a 100 or so weird internet people who liked hanging out together. 

We added follows soon after, when someone started annoying someone else. This hurt new users quite a bit because they started with an empty feed and had to do a lot of work to make it good. So we picked the most active users each week and suggested they follow them when signing up. 

It was built in an incredibly simple way. Every time you loaded your app, we'd run a sql query to fetch the latest casts, hydrate the links and images and serve you a feed. At some point, we moved this into a background job so it would run every 30 seconds, and slow down if you stopped checking the app.