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Fraidycat: Follow from afar

191 points| ddtaylor | 5 years ago |fraidyc.at

62 comments

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[+] kickscondor|5 years ago|reply
Hallooo - this is my project. Glad to offer any help. Thanks for looking in.

Also having a connection issue with both Twitch and TikTok unfortunately right now. Will update here when I have it solved.

UPDATE: The TikTok and Twitch issue is resolved. No need to update the extension - picks up the change automatically.

[+] flanbiscuit|5 years ago|reply
Hi Kickscondor, I've seen you on HN before. Love your aesthetic!

I urge everyone to check out Kickscondor's website for some 90's era web design nostalgia

https://www.kickscondor.com/

[+] maxwelljoslyn|5 years ago|reply
Hey Kicks. Love Fraidycat!

The UI could desperately use a search bar across the names of all feeds/sources a user is following.

EDIT: I don't know JS very well yet but I could try to add it myself. I'll take a look at the Fraidycat source.

[+] Trung0246|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if there's a way to import subscriber list (like the way NewPipe did with youtube account data request) ?
[+] smusamashah|5 years ago|reply
Thank you for this. I was looking for exactly something like this. People post there stuff on all kind of media including blog, twitter, projects, github etc. It's hard to follow someone's work by going through each platform of their choice.

This solves it. Thank you :)

[+] Cocktail|5 years ago|reply
Heyo Kicks! Long time user, love it. One feature would be nice, a possibility to change background colors and such. My eyes cant seem to adapt to the deep blue behind white and i get a headache from it sometimes

Wrong place to put in a ticket i know, but love the project!

[+] mempko|5 years ago|reply
Looks great. Just installed it. Already provides lots of value. Question, your github grid seems low energy recently. Working on anything cool in secret?
[+] hypertexthero|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for making Fraidycat and helping take the web back to the good old RSS days! I especially like the Dire Straits Money for Nothing video-like logo.

I have a question:

Is it possible to make the Fraidycat endpoint on your own server instead of having the browser extension take you to https://fraidyc.at/s/? Or am I totally confused?

[+] rakoo|5 years ago|reply
More than a simple RSS reader, Fraidycat removes the feeling of being overwhelmed when having many feeds with many updates. A chatty website doesn't drown the others, only itself.

There's a second level to organization: if a feed is really too verbose and you realize you don't want to read each and every post you probably want to "demote" its importance and put it in another category.

All of those are most certainly possible with any feed reader but Fraidycat has put it in front

[+] kickscondor|5 years ago|reply
You get it. <3

I get a good number of Github issues with people who want it to act like a normal reader. So there is good reason that most RSS readers act like an inbox. It's just a general expectation.

[+] petercooper|5 years ago|reply
Fraidycat is very cool and I encourage everyone to check it out. It is a fantastic idea and it generally works well.

However, to save you time if you run into the same issue it has with Chrome that I encountered.. there's a bug where using the back button on many sites (including HN and many of our internal apps) can cause a non-logged in page to be fetched and rendered (as if the session cookie isn't being used) - possibly relevant issues: https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/178 and https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/194

[+] kickscondor|5 years ago|reply
I'm sorry about this. I really need to improve this situation. Let me see what I can do today.
[+] 0xADADA|5 years ago|reply
I've been using Fraidycat for a year, and its totally changed my relationship to social media. Namely, i dont connect to social media. I connect to people through their own sites.
[+] kilroy123|5 years ago|reply
Same here! I've used it for a year and I barely ever go on any social media except hackernews.
[+] mutant|5 years ago|reply
I feel like since mozilla stabbed the mobile community in the back with the current version of firefox's complete addon apocalyptic landscape (yes, that's dramatic), tools like fraidycat just don't translate well to casual use.

I miss having an open mobile browser with capabilities, not whatever firefox is now.

[+] kickscondor|5 years ago|reply
Fraidycat 2 is going to offer a desktop service you can use from mobile. It won’t be here till later in the year tho, since I’m busy with another project at the moment.

Extensions are nice because of the low effort to install and try out. But your point ain’t wrong.

[+] Kelamir|5 years ago|reply
I use IceCatMobile, a fork of the Firefox browser, by GNU folks if I'm not mistaken, and it allows installing add-ons.
[+] siegecraft|5 years ago|reply
I thought you could at least get around it by installing firefox nightly and creating custom extension collections.
[+] oezi|5 years ago|reply
I recently dug into Thunderbird's add-on apocalypse and "stabbing in the back" is putting it mindly.
[+] jonny383|5 years ago|reply
Mozilla is a political organisation now. Has been for a few years.

Install kiwi on Android for extension enabled Chromium.

[+] bajsejohannes|5 years ago|reply
Somewhat beside the point, but I don't understand how people are not terrified of browser extensions. I have decided to trust two and hoping to get rid of one of them eventually.

I'm not about to get a browser extension for an RSS reader.

[+] shambulatron|5 years ago|reply
I run Fraidycat in a separate Firefox profile which I don't use for anything else. If I want to hang onto a link from a feed, I'll just open it again in my main profile. I've found a side benefit in that the slight extra friction of opening a window for a new profile results in less frequent checking for feed updates, which seems like a good thing for me.

I also have my Fraidycat profile set up with the Temporary Containers extension, so that every link I open from my feeds automatically opens into an ephemeral container and nothing is shared. Doesn't protect against Fraidycat itself, but does keep things of only passing interest nicely hived off from everything else.

[+] skinkestek|5 years ago|reply
I use two browsers: Plain Firefox with minimal extensions (Bitwarden, Firefox Containers) and then a Firefox Developer edition for all the rest.

The primary is for anything company or client related stuff. It is where I debug client websites (at least if I need to log in), check mail etc.

The other one is for research.

Last time I know I was hit by malware was on a locked down company laptop >10 so years ago, a drive by exploit from a banner ad on a blog.

Conclusion might surprise some of you: I'm still scared! (Which might be the reason why this actually works for me.)

[+] syrrim|5 years ago|reply
The traditional model of application installation gives the application total control over your user account, including your browser.

Installing an RSS reader as a separate program would in fact be more dangerous than one as an extension.

[+] nsilvestri|5 years ago|reply
I've been using it for a while and enjoy it a lot. One thing I've never understood is why there are time-based categories. What's the point of anything except the real-time feed? If I don't want updates as soon as possible, then I also don't want to keep track of it. Never understood the use case.
[+] kickscondor|5 years ago|reply
Importance is organizational and just hints three things:

* Which feeds are fetched first.

* Which feeds are hidden from view. (Only 'real-time' is show on the first view.)

* The tab for each tag will be colored according to the status of 'Real-time' follows.

Importance is not a fixed number. It acts as a gradient: https://twitter.com/glitchyowl/status/1285757728049094656

Fortunately it's a very small feature and can be ignored. To other users, it is a crucial feature - and establishes the mindset of how to think about your follows. (That you can follow hundreds or thousands of people and move some into the background - to check on a much less frequent basis.)

Really appreciate the question, nsilvestri, and that you've made your own good use of Fraidycat.

[+] olah_1|5 years ago|reply
It’s worth noting that Mask.io are doing a similar thing. Except they’re scraping and storing everything in an encrypted network. And when you post, you’re just posting encrypted text that your friends can then read with mask. So you’re only using the main social networks for the transport layer.

Pretty interesting idea.

[+] brunjact|5 years ago|reply
Been using it for 6 months!

No issues so far, nor do I miss feature _X_ from previous readers I've used.

I don't use the Importance filters.

[+] syx|5 years ago|reply
I've been using this as my main RSS feed for 3 months now, it's really neat!
[+] y7|5 years ago|reply
This is one piece of software that I really love using.

One big feature is that it allows me to keep track of Twitter/Youtube channels without being logged into an account, while also keeping everything in one place.

[+] briefcomment|5 years ago|reply
I would like to request a Safari extension if possible.
[+] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
I’m seeing a heck of a lot of these services coming out recently.

I’m sure they are quite useful for a lot of folks, but for me, it was just a bunch of Slack or email notifications that usually showed me my own social media feeds.

I’m probably not the target audience for these services. I don’t really have (or want to have) a big social media presence.

[+] neolog|5 years ago|reply
I have a long list of RSS and Atom urls. How can I get them into this program?
[+] kickscondor|5 years ago|reply
If you can export them to OPML, then you can import them into Fraidycat. (The 'gear' icon in the upper-right corner will take you to the Settings page, where you can import and export OPML.)
[+] suifbwish|5 years ago|reply
Isn’t this what social mapper and the social engineering toolkit are for?
[+] reidjs|5 years ago|reply
Is there a list of social media sites supported by fraidycat somewhere?
[+] kickscondor|5 years ago|reply
Aside from RSS, Atom, Twtxt, JSON Feed and TiddlyWiki:

- Bandcamp - DeviantArt - Facebook (public users) - Github - Instagram - Kickstarter - Patreon - Pinterest - Reddit - Soundcloud - Tumblr - TikTok - Twitch - Twitter - Vimeo - YouTube

Some other smaller sites are also described in the definition file: https://fraidyc.at/defs/social.json