So I built this - and its initial purpose was just to help me keep up on public TiddlyWikis (like philosopher.life) that I had discovered. But I couldn't get myself to rip off other news readers - I've not been satisfied with RSS and I disliked Google Reader. I didn't like that it basically created a second read-only email inbox - where I'm supposed to look through every message. And I didn't like that I lost the formatting and styling of the original hypertext. I much preferred just surfing my favorite sites periodically.
As I began to add blogs, Twitter, YouTube support - it felt like I was connecting the whole Web, as if it was all one network, almost as if I viewed it like the government does. (Equipped with my own personal XKeyscore Lite.) I had felt isolated before - unable to see past whatever was being recommended to me on Twitter - but now I had a tool that forced me to rouse my dormant research skills. The task of reading, writing, publishing and hunting on the Web is a formidable one - and we're far from mastering it. It's no wonder that we abdicated to social networks that attempt to do it all for us.
So yeah - Fraidycat is a very small attempt to move toward tools that give us some power. It really only adds the ability to assign "importance" to someone you are following - allowing you to track them without needing to be aware of them every second. But hey - it's four months old - I think it's a good start and hopefully others here can be encouraged by it to work on tools for the World-Wide Web again.
I think you're exploring an important space here. Good luck!
Also, the video essay you made about this (https://youtu.be/zgA4GzRsldI for anyone interested) is incredibly well-produced. I was expecting it to be someone mumbling over a screencast, but it's the total opposite.
I love this already. It's been one of my biggest gripes of social media that I can't just follow people and catch what they're up to on my terms, sans "the platform" nudging me to interact this way, like this, star that, react to that over there because someone three degrees of separation did it, watch a video someone uploaded of their dinner. I want to passively observe and interact if I want to.
This is what I've wanted. It's like a living notepad file full of links
One of the things you've done that I really like is the focus on people instead of posts - this shifts the system away from favoring noisy or loud individuals which is the correct sort of shift in my opinion.
This is the closer to what I imagined the Dip from "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" would be that I have encountered so far - maybe I'm miss remembering and it was not a software at all but I have been looking for some kind of hub like this since I read that book. So glad I checked this link. Thanks for making it!
After leaving social media, I've been wanting something like this for a long time, and considered 'scratching my own itch', as you have. I settled on Feedly being good enough. It still isn't great: e.g. the Android widget is hopeless; I miss out on content because links sometimes don't refresh for days. I'm using the free option, so maybe the paid option is better, but it's free offering hasn't convinced me this is a good idea.
So I'm wondering whether to port all my follows over to fraidycat. Have you used Feedly or it's ilk before? How do you think it compares? Also, if I switch, how will you be keeping the lights on? Is there some monetization strategy in your mind?
This really scratches and itch for me. I've felt similarly about RSS readers, they kind of work but as you point out most news feeds privilege the most voluminous posters at everyone else's expense. Love it.
Very Neat! Gonna explore this to my heart's content. Huge fan of your personal website - all those writeups, thoughts on hypertext, decentralization and that dadaesque/surrealist aesthetic dripping everywhere. Discovered you when you listed my blog in one of your listicles. Good luck!
Hey, this is amazing! I'm currently working on www.inverse.network, a new way for groups to talk all over the web :) Would love to chat. [email protected]
I’ve built something not too dissimilar, but focused on slowing down too, so instead of a feed with changes you get a daily digest of the new things that happened.
It also allows you to view the regular formatting, etc.
If you’re curious, it’s https://focusd.co and I’d love to hear about what you learned with “figuring out” if there’s an RSS Feed for a given URL.
I love this. Your video is right on, and I've felt this way since Google Reader disappeared and algo feeds took over. Definitely digging into this tonight.
This is a neat project. And based on your appreciation for things like Funny Mapguy (who I checked out after seeing your video) I think we have very similar taste in online culture. Good luck dude!
When the iPhone first allowed apps in an app store I had a conversation with another developer. We brainstormed an idea of an application that would allow you to aggregate all of your conversations with a person. Instead of opening the phone app, the messages app, facebook, twitter, etc. you would instead open the "Joe Smith" app and all of your conversations with that person across any medium would be aggregated in a single place. It is a bit like SoA vs. AoS (Structures of Arrays vs. Array of Structures). By transposing the relationship between app/person to be person/app it could change how we view social media.
What I've found over the following 12 years is that application producers are extremely hostile to anything that would take the user out of their application. It reminds me of early 2000 era websites where external links on some sites were not allowed.
The reason why RSS and similar aggregators do not work has nothing to do with technology. Any technology that allows you to follow the stars of a social media platform outside of that platform (or aggregate across platforms) will face a level of of opposition that is likely to be insurmountable.
I love the design, especially the bizarre loading screen. Initial UX thoughts from a elfeed user who imported their feeds with an opml:
- It would be great if the enter and close buttons were in the same spot, instead of the close button jumping to the bottom, so you could open and close drawers more easily.
- It'd be great if links could be shaded after they'd been opened, or marked somehow else as having been read.
- Would love to be able to reorder tabs
- Would be great if you could change the label for all the entries in a group in one go. Eg, I set the yellow geekface emoji for my tech follows, but I want to change this to a darker skinned variant without having to do so one-by-one.
- After I've added my feeds and given them all categories, the home tab is empty and calls me to add follows. It's unclear if I'm waiting for feeds to update or something, or if I need to leave some uncategorised, etc.
- Love the graphs but I'm not exactly sure what they mean.
- As you'd expect from an emacs user, would love to have more keyboard binding. Cycle through, unfold this drawer, unfold all drawers, switch tab, etc.
> There is no news feed. Rather than showing you a massive inbox of new posts to sort through, you see a list of recently active individuals. No one can noisily take over this page, since every follow has a summary that takes up a mere two lines.
I absolutely love this timeline algorithm and was just thinking about something similar last week. This way prolific posters don't flood my feed. We need more experiments like these.
This is the paradigmatically different internet I never knew I craved. I'm totally hooked on your idea: this is what the internet beyond 2020 should be.
No more walled gardens and network effect lock-in; people first, apps second.
Very cool project and basically a modern RSS feed reader for a modern web where not everything has a standardized feed to digest. Which is a little sad... Something like this is really useful for what it does but I'm afraid of how much upkeep might be required if it's scraping pages (which would be required for some platform so it's unavoidable).
Site scraping is definitely my biggest struggle - this is the primary reason it's taken me four months to get to this seemingly simple app ready to post here. I now have a pretty good system in place. I keep a master list of scraping rules that I can update without needing to re-release new Fraidycat versions. I also have an update coming that will allow me to scrape at different stages of the rendering process and to scrape external files that the rendered page relies on. (This will be used for TikTok support, for instance.)
I realize this could be a bit of an arms race, but I don't think it has to be that way. Fraidycat doesn't syndicate the content - it encourages people to visit the actual site. So I believe a platform benefits from integrating well with it. Thanks for checking it out!
previously a similar service was present - FriendFeed. You could aggregate all your friend's feeds into a single location.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
They created and later opensourced Tornado(Python based HTTP framework for handling large number of threads)
I like this idea. I'm very tired of trying to sift through publishers (individuals too) sorted by some opaque, perennially ineffective algorithm.
Twitter, for instance - I follow hundreds of people, but my notifications are literally 100% Rick Wilson. I have absolutely no idea how they made this decision, but it's way off the mark.
On Instagram, there's an account that's my favorite. I've liked every photo they post. They haven't shown up in my feed for months. Checked their account and they've been posting new content daily for 3 weeks. Meanwhile my fees shows me pics of some guy I don't care about at all walking his dog in vacation.
First, I’d like to say I really like this project, particularly how it takes the focus away from high frequency posters to active individuals.
A possible feature that I would want to see is to be able to have a single tab that would allow for filtering based on the platform, tag, individual, etc.
I actually had an idea for something like this about a month ago. I'm not 100% sure how fraidycat operates, but I was thinking of some sort of social media aggregator that would only show updates at most once per day. The intention behind it being along a similar vein: to keep myself from doing the constant app switch and refresh just to make sure I wasn't missing out. Not that I would have ever executed, but I ditched the idea after looking through facebook's graph API and seeing that it wasn't feasible.
I never thought of making it a browser extension though! Good job, this is awesome!
That's very amusing - I originally intended Fraidycat to be "closed" except for a brief window between 7 PM and 7:10 PM - we must be on the same biorhythm. It does update throughout the day - but perhaps there is another extension that can block Fraidycat when you don't want the distractions.
Circa 4 weeks ago I had the same core idea! I think this is very interesting to be able to follow people you respect or are interested in one way or another, regardless of the platform where you find them. A kind of global Twitter.
This has potential to become the new version of a social network.
Kudos on executing it
PS: Initially I thought that the killer platform to adopt such a thing would be keybase! I even thought of tweeting to them, but then the idea just fleeted away. Oh well..
I like that you have a style for your UI that (at least looking at your other projects) is completely yours. I think more developers that release small projects all the time should do this.
The idea of not letting one noisy person overshadow the more quiet ones reminds me of one of my old projects Latest Tweets [1].
It was a single page that displayed just a one latest tweet from everyone you followed on Twitter. I wanted to be able to see people who tweet indecently more easily.
It stopped working after Twitter shut down the v1 API and I didn’t try to update it, but there was something intriguing about the premise compared to the traditional feed, and I miss being able to use it.
I’m really glad to see this project that is much more polished and featureful!
But that forces me to manually find the episodes and add each one to my podcast app.
I want something that aggregates appearances into a cross-podcast RSS feed that I can subscribe to in my app. Automatically subscribe to every one of their appearances.
"If only every network used RSS!" The big ones dont use RSS for a reason, they want you on the page to show adds. I expect they will start blocking access once you get above their radar. Good luck though.
[+] [-] kickscondor|6 years ago|reply
As I began to add blogs, Twitter, YouTube support - it felt like I was connecting the whole Web, as if it was all one network, almost as if I viewed it like the government does. (Equipped with my own personal XKeyscore Lite.) I had felt isolated before - unable to see past whatever was being recommended to me on Twitter - but now I had a tool that forced me to rouse my dormant research skills. The task of reading, writing, publishing and hunting on the Web is a formidable one - and we're far from mastering it. It's no wonder that we abdicated to social networks that attempt to do it all for us.
So yeah - Fraidycat is a very small attempt to move toward tools that give us some power. It really only adds the ability to assign "importance" to someone you are following - allowing you to track them without needing to be aware of them every second. But hey - it's four months old - I think it's a good start and hopefully others here can be encouraged by it to work on tools for the World-Wide Web again.
[+] [-] atroche|6 years ago|reply
Also, the video essay you made about this (https://youtu.be/zgA4GzRsldI for anyone interested) is incredibly well-produced. I was expecting it to be someone mumbling over a screencast, but it's the total opposite.
[+] [-] dvtrn|6 years ago|reply
This is what I've wanted. It's like a living notepad file full of links
Great work, excited to put this to work
[+] [-] vorpalhex|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccktlmazeltov|6 years ago|reply
If this is it then I think there is a big potential. Actually, there might be a bigger potential as a SaaS than a browser plugin.
It'd be cool if you can share your newsfeed, or absorb other people's newsfeed.
[+] [-] dtakuma|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h0l0cube|6 years ago|reply
So I'm wondering whether to port all my follows over to fraidycat. Have you used Feedly or it's ilk before? How do you think it compares? Also, if I switch, how will you be keeping the lights on? Is there some monetization strategy in your mind?
[+] [-] tomgp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qqn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yantrams|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haaaris|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BrunoBernardino|6 years ago|reply
I’ve built something not too dissimilar, but focused on slowing down too, so instead of a feed with changes you get a daily digest of the new things that happened.
It also allows you to view the regular formatting, etc.
If you’re curious, it’s https://focusd.co and I’d love to hear about what you learned with “figuring out” if there’s an RSS Feed for a given URL.
[+] [-] wpietri|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sailfast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohduran|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jotm|6 years ago|reply
I'll put more time in playing with it.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cableclasper|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easygenes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigoviolet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meremortals|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoopism|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmvaldman|6 years ago|reply
also, best promo video of all time and amazing concept. we'd be great friends IRL. alas.
[+] [-] reggieband|6 years ago|reply
What I've found over the following 12 years is that application producers are extremely hostile to anything that would take the user out of their application. It reminds me of early 2000 era websites where external links on some sites were not allowed.
The reason why RSS and similar aggregators do not work has nothing to do with technology. Any technology that allows you to follow the stars of a social media platform outside of that platform (or aggregate across platforms) will face a level of of opposition that is likely to be insurmountable.
[+] [-] nanna|6 years ago|reply
And the video is amazing.
I love the design, especially the bizarre loading screen. Initial UX thoughts from a elfeed user who imported their feeds with an opml:
- It would be great if the enter and close buttons were in the same spot, instead of the close button jumping to the bottom, so you could open and close drawers more easily.
- It'd be great if links could be shaded after they'd been opened, or marked somehow else as having been read.
- Would love to be able to reorder tabs
- Would be great if you could change the label for all the entries in a group in one go. Eg, I set the yellow geekface emoji for my tech follows, but I want to change this to a darker skinned variant without having to do so one-by-one.
- After I've added my feeds and given them all categories, the home tab is empty and calls me to add follows. It's unclear if I'm waiting for feeds to update or something, or if I need to leave some uncategorised, etc.
- Love the graphs but I'm not exactly sure what they mean.
- As you'd expect from an emacs user, would love to have more keyboard binding. Cycle through, unfold this drawer, unfold all drawers, switch tab, etc.
Thanks for this ace project!
[+] [-] fenwick67|6 years ago|reply
I absolutely love this timeline algorithm and was just thinking about something similar last week. This way prolific posters don't flood my feed. We need more experiments like these.
[+] [-] twic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isoprophlex|6 years ago|reply
No more walled gardens and network effect lock-in; people first, apps second.
Fantastic work.
[+] [-] overshard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickscondor|6 years ago|reply
I realize this could be a bit of an arms race, but I don't think it has to be that way. Fraidycat doesn't syndicate the content - it encourages people to visit the actual site. So I believe a platform benefits from integrating well with it. Thanks for checking it out!
[+] [-] isoprophlex|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sairamkunala|6 years ago|reply
They created and later opensourced Tornado(Python based HTTP framework for handling large number of threads)
[+] [-] czottmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|6 years ago|reply
Twitter, for instance - I follow hundreds of people, but my notifications are literally 100% Rick Wilson. I have absolutely no idea how they made this decision, but it's way off the mark.
On Instagram, there's an account that's my favorite. I've liked every photo they post. They haven't shown up in my feed for months. Checked their account and they've been posting new content daily for 3 weeks. Meanwhile my fees shows me pics of some guy I don't care about at all walking his dog in vacation.
[+] [-] whichquestion|6 years ago|reply
A possible feature that I would want to see is to be able to have a single tab that would allow for filtering based on the platform, tag, individual, etc.
[+] [-] kickscondor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CitrusFruits|6 years ago|reply
I actually had an idea for something like this about a month ago. I'm not 100% sure how fraidycat operates, but I was thinking of some sort of social media aggregator that would only show updates at most once per day. The intention behind it being along a similar vein: to keep myself from doing the constant app switch and refresh just to make sure I wasn't missing out. Not that I would have ever executed, but I ditched the idea after looking through facebook's graph API and seeing that it wasn't feasible.
I never thought of making it a browser extension though! Good job, this is awesome!
[+] [-] kickscondor|6 years ago|reply
Thank you for the encouragement!
[+] [-] joantune|6 years ago|reply
PS: Initially I thought that the killer platform to adopt such a thing would be keybase! I even thought of tweeting to them, but then the idea just fleeted away. Oh well..
[+] [-] goblin89|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrdwdmrbl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fenwick67|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yunusabd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pletsch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmitshur|6 years ago|reply
It was a single page that displayed just a one latest tweet from everyone you followed on Twitter. I wanted to be able to see people who tweet indecently more easily.
It stopped working after Twitter shut down the v1 API and I didn’t try to update it, but there was something intriguing about the premise compared to the traditional feed, and I miss being able to use it.
I’m really glad to see this project that is much more polished and featureful!
[1]: https://github.com/shurcooL-legacy/latest-tweets
[+] [-] newtoday|6 years ago|reply
@kickscondor feature idea: it would be awesome if users could share their feed sources as a community shared feed that one could switch to.
Edit: I see now that ccktlmazeltov said the same 2 hours ago
[+] [-] kickscondor|6 years ago|reply
Thank you for the nice words.
[+] [-] pkamb|6 years ago|reply
This is something I have a real need for. Specifically, podcast hosts. I want to follow certain hosts and listen to every random show they're on.
Some hosts do keep lists of their appearances across many shows: http://hypercritical.co/about/appearances/
But that forces me to manually find the episodes and add each one to my podcast app.
I want something that aggregates appearances into a cross-podcast RSS feed that I can subscribe to in my app. Automatically subscribe to every one of their appearances.
[+] [-] boznz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z0mbie42|6 years ago|reply
I would really love to see a Mastodon (Fediverse?) client implementing it!
Congrats @ author!