minimalens (✂️, ✂️)

Every twitter-user knows the struggle of following too many accounts and seeing the timeline degrade from a useful instrument to a worthless gizmo. Problems like these can be solved by simple tools, but with TwitterAPI becoming increasingly less accessible and this taking a toll on user experience, it becomes evident that there is a need for a more permissionless social media platform.

That is why Minimalens is build on top of Lens Protocol. The project is providing a compact and straight-forward tool that helps users to declutter their Lens accounts by unfollowing any accounts they did not interact with in a given, self-defined timespan. Users can sign in with their lens handle and get a list of users from their following-list that they have not interacted with in the timespan. The tool then makes it very easy to unfollow all of the suggested accounts to clear up the users account.

Today, Minimalens is only allowing categorization by timestamp of last interaction, but in the future there are countless possibilities of organizing a social feed based on interactions and content. In a time where Big Tech is gaining more control and awareness is becoming an increasingly rare resource, change is needed. Minimalens is a small step towards self-determination on social media. On the technical side, this could be achieved by deploying a custom module on Lens, which will allow every user to continuously keep their social feed clean.

Building Minimalens required a diverse tech stack, each component essential to its function. The Python backend, utilizing Flask as the web framework, was hosted on PythonAnywhere, chosen for its Python-specific environment and Flask support.

The frontend, designed using TypeScript and React, ensured an interactive UI with error-checking during development and efficient data rendering.

BigQuery managed data in Minimalens, its rapid SQL queries and interactive analysis capabilities crucial for handling vast social media data.

Lens Protocol SDK and API were integrated for interfacing with Lens social media data, tracking user interactions, and managing the unfollowing process. Lens Protocol signing ensured data authenticity.

The Polygon blockchain was implemented for secure transaction handling, its scalability and low-cost transactions were vital for the app's blockchain functionality.

Metamask was used for user authentication and transaction signing, providing a seamless user experience with its browser extension.

One notable hack involved optimizing our queries and data schemas with BigQuery to efficiently process large amounts of data.