The problem Nounspace solves

Social media is rigid and monolithic. Nounspace is on the opposite end of the spectrum, empowering users and communities to customize every aspect of their space (profile) or homebase (space only the owner can see), including the look, content, sound, and functionality.

Nounspace bridges the gap between social and the online (and onchain) universe. The majority of content that gets created online is only shared on social if somebody posts it. Then, it only shows up in the feed for a fleeting moment, and OP is lucky if people notice it while they scroll. Nounspace enables users and communities to bring any type of online content they can dream of right into their custom space or homebase alongside social feeds powered by Farcaster, including content like news, blogs, forums, chat groups, games, music, video, tools, websites, governance, onchain data, and even entire applications.

Nounspace is the ultimate way for communities to share the content, functionality, and vibes they want with their audiences.

It’s also the ultimate way for users to customize their own launchpads and control panels for exploring the online universe. Users can customize the theme and fidgets on multiple tabs, create a bespoke experience featuring the content, communities, and functionality that interests them.

Last but not least, Nounspace solves the pressing problem of there being very few “consumer” applications in crypto, especially outside of financial use-cases. We believe we’ve built a killer app that will play a critical role in onboarding the next billion users to web3.

Challenges I ran into

Mobile UX - Figuring out how to make it easy for users to interact with multiple fidgets on a space, handle infinite scrolling fidgets, theme editing, and make it a good experience was one of the hardest, (but also most fun and interesting) challenges. We figured out the UX, but in the end decided to defer working on the mobile experience until after alpha launch. For now, nounspace is web-only. We’re super excited to use any funds we earn to continue building and bring the sleek mobile UX to life!

Forking open source projects - We forked the amazing open source farcaster client, Herocast, which gave us a head start with a lot of the core Warpcast functionality. However, this meant we had to familiarize ourselves with a foreign codebase, which is also in the early + rapid development phase. This was a big challenge, but we were able to make it work and have a great relationship with the Herocast team, and were able to contribute some valuable stuff back such as Frames support.

Fidget security - Figuring out how to give users (and soon, developers) the maximum amount of freedom when configuring (and soon, building) Fidgets was a huge security challenge. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and we think we came up with the right solutions. We were fortunate to get support from a crypto security expert, and hope to get more feedback in the coming weeks before we open up third party fidget development.