Last year @grit launched his Farcaster web client, The Rhizome, the aesthetic first Farcaster client inspired by pinterest/tumblr/arena. I was an early user, and grit reached out for some feedback. I mentioned that it'd be great to build a mobile client for it. I had some free time and offered to help start on it. Grit was down.

We started working in September, and did a pretty good sprint for a few months. We were trying to build a really polished client, with a crypto wallet and frames support, integrations from Zora, and more. Life happened, and we weren't able to get it across the finish line. But we made some great progress. I got the app in TestFlight recently, just so I could use it personally. Last week I dm'd grit and asked if he was down to ship it to app stores and open source the code to let anyone contribute. He was down. We got an Android release approved, and users can download the app here. iOS was being a diva in the review process so TestFlight only at the moment. You can find the code for the app here.

Why Rhizome

I was initially inspired by the aesthetic curation grit created in The Rhizome web client. Using the app resulted in unregretted screen time. I was also discovering more users and channels that other Farcaster clients had not presented to me.

Then in working more with grit on the mobile client, I was introduced to other apps like are.na, which is a really cool bootstrapped platform used by students, hobbyists and designers. If you look at their about page, they're pretty transparent about their business. Everything from roadmap to finances and change log is public.

It's a very aesthetically inspirational feed, similar to The Rhizome. They also have an open API that could be used to pull in some of the content into The Rhizome app. There's other apps in the same category like sublime.app, cosmos.so, savee, or silk.cx. Essentially these are bootstrapped networks of like-minded creatives and designers that are creating the internet they want to see. Curation versus consumption. Beauty and aesthetics matter to a lot of people, including chronically online internet users. The Rhizome could be a place where aesthetically pleasing content is curated from various platforms, and can be crypto enabled.

Learnings in Development

You'll see in the code, that the app uses Neynar and Pinata to integrate with Farcaster. We went through a few different options before we landed on this.

There was a point where we thought about running our own Farcaster hub. We had implemented farcaster auth kit, and followed instructions here to generate the signer key. After doing this, we realized that this was probably overkill and should only do that if we really needed it and there weren't any easier options. We tried a few more things, including Privy, but ultimately ended up with the SIWN implementation. Kudos to Neynar for making dead-simple tools that are pretty much plug and play for anything you want to do on Farcaster. I'm glad we explored all our options because I learned a lot, and it also led me to get a PR merged in the Farcaster docs repo related to the signer key documentation.

What's Next

The Rhizome is open source now. Anyone can contribute. The app is all grit's vision. We had discussed many cool features including a paid option, list creation, bookmarks, frames support, showing content from Zora and other networks, and much more. I hope that open sourcing the code would enable broader collaboration and more interesting features to be added. I know that I'll continue contributing when I have bandwidth. There are some ideas in the README on GitHub for some things that I think would be cool.

Links

GitHub

Android

iOS