As of June 1, 2024, the /slowcore-hq channel has shifted its focus to the fledgling slowcore movement on Farcaster. We — channel co-hosts Trish Deneen and I — will soon create a separate channel for Black Stone Sanctuary, the Pagan monastery bootstrapping project.

Why the split into two channels? Because slowcore has become a Farcaster-seeded movement that "belongs" to the FC scenius and community. We love slowcore. Now that it's found its way into the fertile soil of the FC scenius to incubate, we want to give it the space it needs to bloom!

Some backstory on how we chose the channel name may be helpful here. We were originally planning to call our channel /blackstonesanctuary, but that's 19 characters, and the limit is 16. We considered many abbreviations, but none seemed to fit, so we settled on /slowcore-hq. We'd been using the term "slowcore" in our inner circles and taking a slowcore approach to spiritual practice for awhile, so it made sense at the time.

I first used the term "slowcore" on Farcaster in late March and early April while we were preparing for Black Stone Santuary's onchain launch week. When we launched /slowcore-hq as Black Stone Sanctuary (April 8, 2024), we followed the example of the /fc-updates channel: we required a channel pass, set a high price for it in warps, and made the channel broadcast-only so only Trish and I would post top-level casts. We did this only as a temporary measure to protect everyone's time and attention from spammers/engagement farming, while hoping to encourage high-quality discussion in the comments.

We weren't expecting to need two separate channels. But once channels began decentralizing (May 23, 2024) and the slowcore concept took on a life of its own, we felt it was no longer appropriate to keep /slowcore-hq intertwined with the religious focus of the Black Stone Sanctuary project.

(Text adapted from “Welcome to the Slowcore HQ Channel on Farcaster” by Danica Swanson. Originally published in A Digital Incubation Space on Paragraph, June 8, 2024. Thumbnail art: “Girl in the Hammock” by Winslow Homer, public domain, via Wikimedia commons).