What are Seam Miniapps?
Seam is a community built social network to create and discover open-source miniapps. You can think of it like Instagram with an appstore. This means that we are all building Seam together! If a way to share doesn’t exist on Seam, you can code it yourself and launch it on Seam for everyone else to use.
The way to share on Seam is the miniapp. Miniapps are tiny playgrounds, allowing you to create content. Miniapps make all the posts on Seam. For example, the Pixel Art miniapp allows you to become a pixel artist, and then share the final masterpiece as a post.
Miniapps create posts.
A miniapp fundamentally has two modes. They start with the singleplayer mode, where you enter data, play the game, or interact with the app. The second mode is how your friends see it in their feeds, which is the finished product of your creative process: the finished song, GIF, or highscore. Some quick examples:
Artistic miniapps first allow artists to draw on a canvas, and then post their watercolor. Yes, Microsoft Paint is basically a miniapp.
Commerce miniapps first allow a seller to decide what to sell and how to make the post look, and then allows users to buy with one tap.
Game miniapps first allow friends to play the game, and then allows them to compete by posting their highscores.
Utility miniapps take the most arcane 3D image filetypes, and then render them properly in the feed.
Creation (Composer)
Miniapps are a creative canvas.
All miniapps live in the composer where you can unlock them to make posts.
Consumption (Posts)
A good rule of thumb for thinking about what makes a good Seam miniapp is: would it create a fun post in my feed?
Empowering a Remixable Internet
To use a miniapp on Seam, you first unlock it by sending 30 Seam Points to the creator of the miniapp. We use Seam Points in the miniapp marketplace because of our commitment to recognize and reward developers for their creative efforts. This opens the door to really earning for what you make, and creatively building stuff together.
It's not just about enriching the Seam platform with a range of diverse miniapps; it's about pioneering a new system for collaborative creation online, and a new non-ad business model for social networks.
How are Miniapps built?
Miniapps are React components coded in Typescript, styled with Tailwind. This means that you can use all the existing React code on the internet to get started creating your miniapp — as a bonus, ChatGPT and other AI assistants are really good at writing React code :)
All miniapps are open source code living in Seam’s miniapp builder repository. To submit new miniapps, you create a pull request, just like any other open-source project.
What’s next?
Jump into our Seam Miniapp Idea List to find inspiration, then go to getseam.xyz/developers to get starting making them, and unleash your creativity! We’re so excited to see what you make.
