# Together: Enhancing the Farcaster Experience through Social Reading Source: https://paragraph.xyz/@ccarella/together-enhancing-the-farcaster-experience-through-social-reading Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Together-Enhancing-the-Farcaster-Experience-through-Social-Reading?index=0x66d96580c08689db6701031236fc6f34c178a4cb5a4bcd8f494bd13b835c0a73cc820af6 Submitted by misha on 2024-09-05 UTC, 4 upvotes, 3 comments ## Summary Farcaster user (the author) has written a concept doc for Together, a proposed mini-app that would add a social reading experience to Farcaster, which they describe as an in-app reader that could work with Paragraph or any URL. The concept offers Reading and Listening modes, with AI-generated audio narration, and a "Now Reading" section showing Farcasters who read an article in the last 48 hours, sorted by people the user follows. Highlights and annotations can be shared as Farcaster Frames, and the author notes that Paragraph has expressed interest in building a mini-app. ## Article I started thinking more about mini-apps last night after reading @ted's cast about her in-app Paragraph feedback and then reading YB's essay on mini-apps. dwr has been heat-checking mini-apps and wondering what people would build, if anything at all and would users really want to use an app inside of an app? I don't have those answers but I do think in-app reading is the first use case that I got excited about. I started working on this concept for an in-app reader. This could be a Paragraph app or could work with any URL like a Read It Later service. The cool thing about mini-apps in Farcaster would be to deeply tie together the social graph to create an experience where bouncing back and forth between the main app and the reading app was additive in a way that would be difficult as a standalone app. To be honest, I'm not sure if this concept has yet crossed that bar but it feels close to something that if you spent a little time with it could get there. The wild thing is that I was concepting this as an interactive prototype using Claude Artifacts. You can check it out here. Then after I prorotyped, I wrote the doc. Together is a mini-app designed to elevate the reading experience within the Farcaster ecosystem. This document explores how Together leverages Farcaster's unique features to create a more engaging and social reading experience. Content Optimization and Dual-Mode Consumption Together offers two primary modes of content consumption: Reading and Listening. The Reading mode presents articles in a clean, distraction-free format, with customizable typography and color schemes to enhance readability. The Listening mode provides AI-generated audio narration, allowing users to consume content hands-free. By operating as a mini-app within Farcaster, Together can directly access shared links and metadata, streamlining the content ingestion process. For example, as links are shared to the Farcaster network they can be processed and cached for both readability and text to speech. Social Features Native to Farcaster Together's most compelling aspect is its deep integration with Farcaster's social mechanics. Comments, reactions, and discussions are synchronized with the Farcaster ecosystem, allowing users to engage in conversations about the content they're consuming with or without the app. The app enables users to create highlights and annotations within articles, which can then be shared as Farcaster Frames. These Frames serve as focal points for discussion, allowing other users to comment on and engage with specific passages or ideas from the article in app or on Warpcast. Together introduces a "Now Reading" section that displays all Farcasters who have read the article in the last 48 hours sorted by peaple you follow. It includes icons indicating whether a user has cast about or commented on the article. Tapping on a user's entry in this section takes you directly to their related cast, facilitating easy access to discussions and perspectives from your network. This feature leverages Farcaster's existing social graph, making it effortless for users to discover and engage with content that's currently resonating within their community. Farcaster Frames Integration Together uses Farcaster Frames to extend its functionality beyond the app interface. Users can share article previews, reading progress, and highlighted quotes directly in their Farcaster feeds using custom Frames. These Frames are interactive, allowing other users to jump directly into the reading experience or participate in prediction markets related to the article's content. Cast Actions and Composer Integration Together extends Farcaster's native cast composer with additional features tailored for sharing and discussing written content. When a user shares an article, the app provides reading time estimates, extracts key quotes, and suggests channels based on the article's content and its reception within the Farcaster network. It also allows you to share the audio version. Cast actions allow users to quickly activate Reading or Listening modes, add articles to a "Read Later" queue, or initiate collaborative reading sessions with their Farcaster connections. These actions are deeply integrated with Farcaster's existing interaction models, making Together feel like a natural extension of the platform rather than a separate application. Mini-apps While mini-apps in Farcaster is yet to be realized, a rapid concept like Together makes me hopeful. It offers a glimpse into how deeply integrated, purpose-built applications could enhance user engagement and create new forms of social interaction within the Farcaster ecosystem. As Farcaster continues to evolve, experiments like mini-apps and other new developer legos will be important for exploring the boundaries of what's possible within a decentralized social network. Social Reading Luckily for all of my readers, while I loved spending an hour in my studio last night thinking about mini-apps and prototyping one with the help of Claude, Paragraph has expressed interest on building a mini-app. So we might get to see how some of this plays out after all. ## Comments **tim**: Honestly, I think people genuinely want something like Kiwi here, a project dedicated to serving people who like to read and write. But then their interests have been so captured by the Farcaster network effects that all they can think of is how to better read on Warpcast. Really, what is fairer to writers and readers than actually sending users out to writers‘ sites through a link on an open source protocol? A third party dev could build „Together“ through Kiwi. I‘m doubtful whether it can be built through FC or by lobbying WC development. Are people who are asking for a niche reading app ignorant of Merkle‘s raise? They‘ll have to 2-10x the 150M raised, and it‘s simply not going to happen by catering to the handful of crypto writers! I‘m not saying this to diss Ccarella or Ted, but this to me is just a ground truth as of now. There would have to exist a new and undiscovered social phenomenon with people writing and reading content online at a mass scale. As bad as it sounds, most people are NPCs. They doom scroll TikTok. They don‘t read. All I can infer from the public information I have is that the WC mandate is to grow at all costs, kinda like Bluesky does. Otherwise how can they survive and ask for their next check? **macbudkowski.eth**: I'd be happy to give it a try once it's out. Wondering how it works from the legal POV - some authors make money by showing ads or getting subscriptions, so wondering if you can show their work without asking for permission? Probably could be covered by working with one specific app like Paragraph that would add it to their T&C and find a way to make subscriptions and mints easy via this mini app. **rileybeans.eth**: I hope someone actually builds this!!!