The social network Farcaster has a 'follow-back' setup that makes info go viral way faster than on traditional platforms.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
Disassortative Mixing in Decentralized Social Network Due to Reciprocal Links
SSRN · 6429207
The Takeaway
Most social networks are 'assortative,' meaning popular people only follow other popular people, creating cliques. Farcaster exhibits 'disassortative' mixing because popular users follow back smaller accounts at a high rate, which mathematically lowers the threshold for content to go viral across the entire system.
From the abstract
Social networks are known to exhibit assortative mixing, and specifically positive degree-degree coefficients, due to homophily of nodes with similar degrees. However, we found that in the decentralized social network Farcaster, assortative coefficients are negative throughout the growth period we examined, even though it shares some similar patterns to centralized social networks, including heavy-tailed degree distribution and preferential attachment. By studying the detailed growth mechanism o