2 months on Farcaster > 12 years on LinkedIn: why the decentralized social math checks out

In this week’s issue:

• Touch Grass: F is for Fuck Vanity Metrics, Friyay posts, and Digital Platforms That Give You the Ick  

• Special Edition: No Job Listings This Week!

Yes, Twitter is the centralized parallel to Farcaster—apples to apples, same basic functionality, yada yada. And yes, I refuse to call it X because that's stupid.

But this isn't about perfect comparisons—it's about finding something that actually works without making you feel gross or annoying the shit out of you every time you open it. Which means I'm going to use LinkedIn—the platform where I've actually spent some time this past year, building connections and slowly getting poisoned by professional performance theater—as the comparative in today’s newsletter.

The great LinkedIn breakup (they beat me to it)

Two months ago, LinkedIn decided I was no longer a real person. Not gradually, not with warnings—just boom, account restricted, good luck figuring out why.

The last thing I posted? A PSA about the importance of paying people for spec work and take-homes that employers assign during interviews. I’d been burned by dozens of hours of said take-homes (not to mention hours of interviews), and knew thousands of others had had the same experience. So I posted about it in a matter-of-fact way. I didn’t even curse. And then poof, I got the boot.

I don’t think that post is what ended it for me, but something did and what followed was two months of customer service runaround hell that just might beat the pants off the IRS, DMV, and Spirit Airlines combined. Automated responses, dead-end forms, broken links, two-factor authentications followed by multiple requests for identity verifications, and my personal favorite: being told my husband couldn’t message them through his LinkedIn on my behalf. Not letting a man vouch for a woman’s existence? At least they’re progressive.

Throughout these two-ish months I simultaneously started becoming more and more active on Farcaster. Thank fucking satan.

If I think about this time period as a graph, here’s what I see: eventually the apex of LinkedIn frustration intersected with the exponential rewards of using Farcaster, and something shifted.

I don’t need LinkedIn. In fact, I never did.

The "everyone's here so I have to stay" trap

We've all heard it. Hell, I've said it: I hate this platform, but everyone's here, so I have to be here too. Ugh, makes me puke in my mouth a little.

It's the digital equivalent of staying in a relationship because you've already invested so much time, even though your partner humble-brags constantly and generally just sucks.

In economics, this is called the sunk cost fallacy. In therapy, it’s Stockholm syndrome. tbh though, it’s not straight sunk cost fallacy. It’s sunk cost fallacy littered with fomo. fomo: on a job opp, a job opp connection, a contract, the single connection to top all connections, etc.

But here's what I realized from getting unceremoniously kicked off LinkedIn (and what I already know, feel, and live irl): quality beats quantity every single time. Like, quality literally roundhouse kicks quantity to the face.

Losing all those "connections" I’d made over the years, and gaining real fucking community on Farcaster in months? Yeah, that shit really brought things home for me.

Real change—the kind that actually matters—doesn't happen by doing the same shit that never really worked in the first place. It happens gradually, then suddenly, usually when you stop accepting terrible as normal.

My super deep, utterly insightful takeaway? You can actually leave platforms (and people) that suck.

What decentralized social feels like (hint: kinda like centralized social only 100x better)

Enter Farcaster, in total drag queen diva runway fashion.

Yeah, I was skeptical when I first joined the purple app (as they call it). Another social platform? Really? I didn't understand how to build presence, what the purple app was about, or why people kept talking about "casts" instead of posts.

Like most communities, there was a new lexicon to adopt, adapt, comprehend, make your own. It felt a little overwhelming at first, and like no one was listening.

But after receiving useful tips and help from key individuals within the FC community (what’s up, ted), things started to slap and I haven’t looked back since. Well, except to write this shit.

Farcaster is less aggressive thought leadership and influencer reels, more let’s wander through a really big house with lots of natural light pouring into all these neat rooms and sub-rooms. Let’s drift in and out of conversations, actually read what people write (READERS! They exist!), and find our people.

On Farcaster, I've also made $88 in two months just for being myself. Not because I'm an influencer (god no), not because I'm gaming engagement metrics, but because the platform is built to reward actual participation (more on this in part deux).

Compare all of this to LinkedIn, which feels like being trapped in a fluorescent-lit conference room where everyone's performing their LinkedIn personality, humble-bragging, and “sharing their secrets” in the comments.

And centralized social in general? I've spent years paying for ads for various businesses including Babe itself, only to get DMs from guys asking for feet pics or calling me a "goddamn crazy muppet" for drinking the crypto Kool-Aid.

Peak web2 experience right there.

A quick landscape overview of decentralized social

Farcaster isn't the only decentralized option—there's Mastodon (the Twitter alternative with 1.8 million monthly active users) and Lens Protocol (built by the Aave team), among a few others. I gave Bluesky a shot but it just didn't hit for me. I’ve also heard rumblings of a new decentralized social platform debuting this summer. We’ll see.

As for Farcaster, here’s why I’m sticking around.

Values creators:

• Pays you from day one (not just when you hit follower thresholds)

• Tipping culture is built-in, not an afterthought

• No algorithm deciding who sees your content—people follow you because they want to

Community quality:

• I hear that FC feels like early Twitter but with people who actually read

• Less engagement farming, more genuine conversation

• Creative, tech-savvy crowd that gets what you're building

You don't really need to be crypto-native:

• Channels for everything from politics and origami to cats, drag queens, and french fries

• There's even a channel for this newsletter (and probably your niche interest too)

• Crypto-curious, crypto-maxis, and crypto-skeptics coexist

Other advantages:

• You own your social graph (take your followers with you if you switch apps)

• Multiple client apps use the same underlying protocol

• Built for interoperability, not platform lock-in

The dirty diff between networking and community

It really is quite simple. Networking feels gross because it's transactional. Community feels good because it's relational.

LinkedIn optimizes for networking—connect with people you don't know, endorse skills you can't verify, share content designed for maximum reach instead of meaningful engagement. It's aggressive thought leadership meets professional theatre. And it's annoying as fuck.

Farcaster optimizes for community. Sure, "building community" is just another buzzphrase at this point. But it's also something you can actually do on FC. 

With decentralized social, your social graph belongs to you—if you want to switch apps, your connections come with you. (Unlike mainstream platforms where losing your account means losing everything.) You can also monetize from day one without needing influencer status. And conversations happen because people actually want to share and learn from one another, not because an algorithm decided to show your content to .03% of your followers.

A lot of platforms want your presence without your personhood. Decentralized social kinda flips that.

Yes, the growing pains are real—it's not perfect, the user experience has quirks, and the crypto learning curve shows up in different ways. But the foundation is fundamentally different. The incentives don't actively hate users (they’re the opposite of addiction = engagement = ad revenue).

A psa for anyone considering the jump to decentralized social

If you're thinking about Farcaster, come thru! But please, for the love of all things holy, don’t bring the LinkedIn thought leadership influencer energy with you, k?

Like, zero "here's the thing" openers. No "the key to work-life balance is..." threads. And for sure no "why I left my six-figure job" trauma dumping disguised as inspiration. Farcaster is a real one, and real recognizes real so…

Just speak like the complex, contradictory, gorgeously imperfect human you are. Tell your story or stream of consciousness or jokes in your own voice, not in the voice you think everyone wants to hear. The right people will find you and you will find the right people and chances are it’ll be a pretty grand fucking time.

Why any of this actually matters

This issue of Babe isn't about me shitting on LinkedIn for kicking me out (though, that's a nice bonus). It's about fundamentally different approaches to digital community. It’s about ownership, and jumping the ship before it’s sunk. It’s about leaving toxic relationships, digital and otherwise (this whole things could be a metaphor for sure—isn’t everything?).

Centralized platforms own your content, your connections, and your ability to reach people. They can change algorithms, restrict accounts, or disappear entirely, taking years of your digital life with them. You're building on someone else's empire, and empires always fall.

Decentralized social means you own your stuff. Your posts, your followers, your ability to connect with people—it all belongs to you. The platform serves you instead of the other way around.

Is it perfect? Nah. Is it better than feeling like garbage every time you open a social app? Absolutely.

PS: Subscribe now if you want in on this arithmetic. Miss the last issue? It’s right here. Also literally none of this is ever financial advice. I’m sharing what I learn through Babe, and perhaps you’ll learn from my mistakes. Hopefully, maybe, who knows, ily.