Greenhouse

Greenhouse is a web application built to help Lens Protocol users find and connect/network with web3-native frens and foster the building and furthering of web3 community.

It attempts to solve a current pain point when using Lens: given that I have existing social graphs (e.g. Twitter) outside of Lens, how do I "rebuild" that same social graph on top of Lens? Currently, it's very challenging to "discover" these same (or new!) people on Lens, especially given how new the protocol is and because relatively few people actually have profiles at present.

Like I say in the demo video, "real life" happened during this hackathon -- I was interviewing and changing jobs, preparing for a multi-week trip to Europe as soon as this hackathon concludes, attending in-person events like MCON and Merge-related celebrations, etc etc... That's to say, while I was able to demonstrate the absolute core MVP of what I had in mind, there's a lot more work to do!

What Greenhouse currently does: allows you to input an ENS address and determine if that identity owns a Lens profile.

The vision for what Greenhouse will eventually do includes:

• First and foremost, allowing users to connect with (follow) Lens profiles from directly within the application. Currently, because I was strapped for time, I shell out to the corresponding LensFrens page which allows you to do the same thing (an extra step that can be removed).

• Next, producing a list of "popular" profiles to follow, much like what the .ethLeaderboard (https://ethleaderboard.xyz/) is for Twitter. I've already crawled the data locally to produce this list, but I ran out of time to turn it into a fully-fledged "leaderboard".

• Perhaps most crucially given the importance of Twitter for web3 natives: I intend to allow you to "port" your Twitter social graph over to Lens. In a nutshell, it'd determine which of the people you follow on Twitter have Lens profiles and allow you to easily follow these same people on Lens en masse.

After coming up with a list of tentative names that leaned into the plant-based metaphors of Lens, I eventually settled on "Greenhouse" and was able to secure the greenhouse.social domain for a cool $8 :)

Next, I reached out to a logo designer on Fiverr and had him design me three tentative concepts. The one you see on the website / that I'm using as an icon is the one we ended up moving forward with, and that cost me ~$15.

The web application is built using React, TypeScript, Next.js, and TailwindCSS. It makes use of ethers.js for some of the web3 functionality, and additionally interacts with the Lens API via GraphQL. It then uses a CI/CD pipeline on git push to deploy to Vercel, which my domain's @A record points to.

As a "hack", like I mention elsewhere, I shell out to the user's LensFrens profile page where there's a successful match so that you can connect with (follow) that Lens user. If I had a little more time, I could have embedded the functionality to interact with Lens directly to perform said "follow" action from directly within Greenhouse.

But alas, life happens and (free) time isn't infinite ¯_(ツ)_/¯