Many alternative Farcaster clients are often modeled after the original Farcaster (fka Warpcast, fka Farcaster) app. They closely resemble Twitter - with a central text and media feed that’s either algorithmic or following-based.
But Farcaster is, at its core, a social networking protocol, which can take many forms - clients can be any app where users are sending or posting content of some form. One fresh take on clients that we’re super excited about is Livecaster, a Farcaster client built by @sayangel designed specifically for chatting during live events.
Livecaster is a mini app on Farcaster that hosts “livecasts” during popular events - ranging from the NBA playoffs to F1 races to Base’s recent New Day One event. The app is built entirely on top of Farcaster, and leverages Farcaster reply threads in the form of a chat-based UX.
During a livecast, every message sent is a reply to the original parent cast for that livecast. Users can also reply to each other in the livecast, which just extends the thread at the protocol level. If you’re looking at a Livecaster thread on the native Farcaster app, it may just appear like a post with a bunch of comments unrelated to each other - in the mini app however, it looks exactly like the chatrooms we’re all familiar with.
Livecaster is more than just a new UI skin on top of Farcaster. Because livecasts live on the protocol, they also can take advantage of the composability that an onchain social graph provides, by interfacing with other protocols and products built on top of Farcaster.
For example, Livecaster used Tipn actions to create a new experience rewarding people for good content during the livecast. How did it work?
Angel created a custom Tipn action designed so every time he liked a cast from the Livecaster account, it would send the tip to a new LiveTipnPot contract and mark it as an entry for the recipient. After the livecast was over, all the entries accumulated with the pot into a raffle, where one individual won the full pot!
This composability worked via using Neynar signers for casting and reacting, and webhooks for enabling the Tipn action to happen on a given reaction. Check out Angel’s diagram below:
Because Livecaster likes and replies exist directly on Farcaster, Livecaster users can do the same stuff they would do on the Farcaster app - they talk to Bracky in the chat to place bets live during a sports game, their likes count as Noice tips, and they can manually tip $DEGEN or $TIPN via replies as well.
It’s a great example of how different products built on top of the same social protocol can still work just as fine - in some cases, better - on a completely new app.
There's a few other cool ways that Livecaster can compose with other Farcaster features - for example, since each livecast is tied to a parent cast, it's possible for livecasts to now be collected as NFTs via the Farcaster collectibles feature. Hosts can also get rewarded via Farcaster rewards for hosting livecasts, since the high volume of replies can often elevate them on the leaderboard. The app also uses Neynar Scores to moderate who appears in the chat - a fully public chat interface can often invite spam and degrade the experience for other users, but Neynar Scores can help mitigate spam by only displaying messages above a certain level.
Livecaster has had 545 users register it as a signer so far, who have combined sent over 25,000 total casts. Some Livecasts regularly get over 1000 messages in a single session, with the peak being over 3000 messages sent during Game 7 of the NBA finals on June 22nd. During that game, Livecaster accounted for almost 10% of all protocol cast volume while it was happening.
Farcaster is the best place for building novel social products because the underlying infrastructure is already there, and can tap into existing shared state and functionality. If Livecaster were to be built from scratch, Angel would have had to onboard new users to download a new app, on top of rolling his own messaging infra - it would also have been much more difficult to tap into existing ecosystem products like Tipn, Noice, and Bracky.
If you’re looking to build a social mini app or client that takes full advantage of what Farcaster provides, Neynar has all the tools you need to get started. Our signer infra lets users write to the protocol directly from your app, our webhooks enable you to ingest and react to events, and our mini app toolkit can let you meet users directly where they already are.
Happy building!