Hackathon Ideas

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 we’ve 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 haven’t 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 – 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!

There’s so much more to someone than what you can learn from their Warpcast profile.

Even if you just use publicly available data, it’s possible to give a more “personal” look at someone’s 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 I’d love to see on a profile (ordered roughly by the amount of “signal” they provide, not necessarily how easy it’d be to build):

1. Channels the person hosts

2. Top channels they post in

3. People they engage most with

4. Mutual follows / followers (like Warpcast does now)

5. Top casts from past [30] days

6. 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 “top channels Mark posts in”, I could list “some of my favorite channels”. An unclaimed profile would automatically show the top accounts that person engages with, but a claimed profile could tweak the list to show “some of my favorite follows”.

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?

Farcaster

Mark Fishman on Warpcast

Based on the replies here, my top suggestion would be to enhance search Better search functionality 👇 Find relevant conversations 🔁 Connect with like-minded people https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0xbc72d0

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 I’d expect from a modern search tool (again, roughly in order of importance):

1. Filter by user, channel, and date range

2. Granular text search (boolean operators and phrase matching)

3. Filter by people I follow

4. Filter by links or media

5. Root cast vs. replies

6. Filter/sort by number of replies or likes

7. Filter by account stats: power badge, FID < x, etc.

I would happily pay $5/month for something that does half of this 🙂

I’ve seen a few asks for a “StumbleUpon for Farcaster channels” in the /someone-build channel. There are so many new channels being created that it’s nearly impossible to stay up to date.

Here’s how I imagine a “channel surfer” 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

    1. Top link domains shared

    2. % of root casts with links

    3. % of root casts with images / videos

    4. % 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 don’t know if there is a “right” 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!