We are taking a short break launching new concepts for Concept Testing in order to iterate on our methodology. However, with some big Farcaster hackathons coming up, I wanted to take the opportunity to share some ideas weāve been exploring.
Feel free to get in touch if you want to work on any of these! You don't need our permission, of course, but we're always excited to help with scoping projects.
Okay, sorry for the self-promotion, but...
In case you havenāt seen it yet, Cozycast is a fully-scoped concept, complete with a $3400 bounty raised by 73 contributors / beta testers.
From our original post:
Cozycast is a way to filter the firehose of Farcaster into feeds that matter to you.
We envision a simple app that is designed to let users stay focused on the people, channels, and communities of their choice ā free from additional noise.
Using a mix of the Farcaster social graph and onchain data, Cozycast users will be able to create feeds to their own liking.
Check out the full Cozycast spec here!
Thereās so much more to someone than what you can learn from their Warpcast profile.
Even if you just use publicly available data, itās possible to give a more āpersonalā look at someoneās account.
If done well, people could use this tool to both research new accounts and to promote their own profiles.
One signal that there is demand for this: a number of people asking for the ability to pin casts to their profile.
We want to share more about ourselves!
Some info Iād love to see on a profile (ordered roughly by the amount of āsignalā they provide, not necessarily how easy itād be to build):
Channels the person hosts
Top channels they post in
People they engage most with
Mutual follows / followers (like Warpcast does now)
Top casts from past [30] days
Root cast / reply ratio
I envision the profiles existing for every account automatically on Farcaster (hooray permissionless data!) However, there is an opportunity to let individuals claim their own profiles and further curate the information displayed.
Instead of ātop channels Mark posts inā, I could list āsome of my favorite channelsā. An unclaimed profile would automatically show the top accounts that person engages with, but a claimed profile could tweak the list to show āsome of my favorite followsā.
When a user claims a profile (maybe supported by an NFT purchase?), they could also add more personal information, including pinned casts, links, or even photos.
Search on Farcaster is due for an upgrade. Do you know how long it took me to find this cast?
The original Searchcaster.xyz is legendary, but the "advanced" version is simply searching by account. I know Greg is no longer maintaining the site, and I've experienced some reliability issues fetching newer casts.
Here are some things Iād expect from a modern search tool (again, roughly in order of importance):
Filter by user, channel, and date range
Granular text search (boolean operators and phrase matching)
Filter by people I follow
Filter by links or media
Root cast vs. replies
Filter/sort by number of replies or likes
Filter by account stats: power badge, FID < x, etc.
I would happily pay $5/month for something that does half of this š
Iāve seen a few asks for a āStumbleUpon for Farcaster channelsā in the /someone-build channel. There are so many new channels being created that itās nearly impossible to stay up to date.
Hereās how I imagine a āchannel surferā would work as a website. Each channel has a page with (some combination of) the following information:
High-level info
Channel description
Host info
# of followers
if signed in: # of followers you follow
(If possible: surface channel pass cost or automod rules)
Activity level
# of root casts in past 24h/7d/30d
# of unique posters in past 24h/7d/30d
# of replies per cast
Follower growth in past 24h/7d/30d
Content
Pinned casts
Trending casts
Media
Top link domains shared
% of root casts with links
% of root casts with images / videos
% of root casts with frames
What else would you want to see about a channel that gives you a good overview?
Of course, each page (including the home page) would have a "Jump to random channel"
button.
I donāt know if there is a ārightā way to do this, but it would be neat to see related channels when on a specific channel page.
This would take the channel surfer from being a pure randomizer to more of a guided discovery tool.
I hope this inspires some ideas for those who are building over the next few weeks. We're looking forward to seeing what everyone creates!
Mark Fishman