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.
Sadly something like that will be no longer possible in Europe when the new copyright directive becomes law. But on the other hand it probably never was :(
The website state:
"Fraidycat doesn't communicate with a central server - unless your browser syncs Fraidycat's settings to a central server."
So it seem fine by me.
I had read through the page and figured that it's probably not for me, but then decided to watch the video based on this comment and it is absolutely amazing! It is not just incredibly well-produced, but at the same time whimsical and a poignant commentary on the current social network landscape.
Some people might be put off by the video's style and it's definitely not in the vein of the typical startup product launch, but exactly that makes it the most memorable product launch video in a long time for me, since it's not afraid to show some personality.
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.
It's difficult to know what's better - some people may prefer to see posts, since they may want to find viral memes/videos/takes rather than to have to follow someone's output over time. It seems like a tradeoff to me - similar to short-term vs long-term. So it would be interesting for someone who loves news feeds to rethink them at some point.
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!
Hey thanks. Yeah I have followed Funny Mapguy for years and the amazing part is that he has not once mentioned maps or been funny in any of his videos. It's insane.
So I was reminded on YT homepage to check him out again... I went through about 15-20 last drink reviews (descriptions). They are all 7-8s. I am super curious if he has ever not liked one now.
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. haris@inverse.network
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!
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
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.
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.
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?
Fraidycat doesn't have a central server - so even if I do get knocked off by Facebook Mafia, the software will still function just fine. Can't compare to Feedly, don't know anything about it.
Oh right, I suppose I should have installed it first. I like that it's stand-alone.
While there is much I don't like about Feedly, the things I do like are it's ability to make suggestions, and that also you can add things like YouTube links - like fraidycat. This means if Primitive Technology release a video, I know about it, and it comes up along with developer blogs I follow. The suggestions have been useful in discovering new blogs, but you can't have that with a stand-alone app... unless you provide a server for this. I'd happily provide my anonymized feed list to a server, if I get in return a bunch of adjacent content creators.
Minimo (written in Go) is a nice, clean, minimal self-hostable RSS reader that I can recommend trying out, supports importing Feedly exports, too. Works as a progressive web app in fullscreen when added to your Android home screen, no need for a separate app.
My OS is arch linux. It seems like the app does not use xdg-open (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-open ). Setting the BROWSER environment variable also doesn't seem to work. I don't know any other way to set the default browser.
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!
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!
In case scraping doesn't work for a certain link, you could have a "limited" update feature: Download website html, compress and hash it and store locally; each update cycle, download it, compress, hash and compare to local copy. If it has changed, then simply light it up in the UI. For me, simply seeing that there's something new on the site I want tracked is enough information so I can visit it and check out the new article myself.
Of course, false positives are a downside. Someone fixing a typo shouldn't count as an update. I'm sure the community can think of settings for the "update sensitivity" where level 0 requires at least a new tag to appear on the page, level 1 requires a change of at least N characters, and level 2 notifies on even a change of one character.
I love this extension already and am willing to help out with PRs :-)
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.
Where you can search all your subscriptions by meta data (and possible keyword in post).
An alternative but similar functionality would be a table where you can filter the columns. i.e columns might be Platform,Poster,Date,User Defined Tab[],Platform Tags,Summary
So for instance you can show all posts in between 20200219 and 20200305 not on twitter or youtube that are either your tech or finance tab that have the word covid or corona in the summary.
> 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.
I've muted so many people on Twitter due to their output being much larger than most of the other accounts I followed, drowning the rest. At the very least there should be some rate limiting feature, showing the X most popular posts in a given timeframe only.
The design is just a bunch of random colors. It's non-standard.
I haven't added a button like that yet. It would require me to snoop on web requests that the browser is doing. And I'm reluctant to do that at the moment. I do like the recent idea of adding a bookmarklet: https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/99
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)
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.
XMPP, RSS, and similar protocols feel like they died due to this. Technical stuff, sure, but I tend to view the technical reasons more as business justifications for lock-in than "legit" issues.
I work in the micromobility vertical, which is facing some of these issues around trips, privacy, companies owning data, and cities wanting open data. Stuff like this [1] is popping up more and more.
> 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
Emphasis on less. The Android implementation of the Hub is gimped compared to BB10. On BB10, tapping a conversation would open it directly in a sub-view, while on Android it acts more like an incomplete list of links, where clicking the link opens the app and breaks the back button. It's such a sub-par experience that I only use it for e-mail these days, where it excels (I haven't found anything better for email).
I can't wait for mobile support, although I noticed the plan is for Firefox users and I'm still stuck on Chrome.
I think a neat feature would be to group multiple sites together for a single individual. For example, following a web comic and connecting that with the artist's Twitter, as a single item.
I'm curious as to whether it keeps track of which items I've seen or whether it only has a staleness measure
This is awesome, I've been meaning to code some sort of intranet for my home with something like this for myself. Maybe now this one will just be a link within my intranet. Still havent worked out what I want for my intranet entirely. There are so many web based solutions you could make your own (internal) cloud OS.
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.
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.
152 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadAs 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.
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.
The website state: "Fraidycat doesn't communicate with a central server - unless your browser syncs Fraidycat's settings to a central server." So it seem fine by me.
Some people might be put off by the video's style and it's definitely not in the vein of the typical startup product launch, but exactly that makes it the most memorable product launch video in a long time for me, since it's not afraid to show some personality.
I'll put more time in playing with it.
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.
This is what I've wanted. It's like a living notepad file full of links
Great work, excited to put this to work
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.
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?
While there is much I don't like about Feedly, the things I do like are it's ability to make suggestions, and that also you can add things like YouTube links - like fraidycat. This means if Primitive Technology release a video, I know about it, and it comes up along with developer blogs I follow. The suggestions have been useful in discovering new blogs, but you can't have that with a stand-alone app... unless you provide a server for this. I'd happily provide my anonymized feed list to a server, if I get in return a bunch of adjacent content creators.
also, best promo video of all time and amazing concept. we'd be great friends IRL. alas.
this could be the foundation of what my request was implying. it's the data pipe, but would need the frontend the OP is building
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!
Of course, false positives are a downside. Someone fixing a typo shouldn't count as an update. I'm sure the community can think of settings for the "update sensitivity" where level 0 requires at least a new tag to appear on the page, level 1 requires a change of at least N characters, and level 2 notifies on even a change of one character.
I love this extension already and am willing to help out with PRs :-)
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.
https://www.novelupdates.com/series-finder/ https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Where you can search all your subscriptions by meta data (and possible keyword in post).
An alternative but similar functionality would be a table where you can filter the columns. i.e columns might be Platform,Poster,Date,User Defined Tab[],Platform Tags,Summary
So for instance you can show all posts in between 20200219 and 20200305 not on twitter or youtube that are either your tech or finance tab that have the word covid or corona in the summary.
Great work by the way.
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.
Does this flag up a button on pages which I can follow when I'm on them? E.g. if I'm on a blog with RSS does a button appear so I can subscribe to it?
I haven't added a button like that yet. It would require me to snoop on web requests that the browser is doing. And I'm reluctant to do that at the moment. I do like the recent idea of adding a bookmarklet: https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/99
Although the permissions system gives you access to all sites.
They created and later opensourced Tornado(Python based HTTP framework for handling large number of threads)
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 work in the micromobility vertical, which is facing some of these issues around trips, privacy, companies owning data, and cities wanting open data. Stuff like this [1] is popping up more and more.
https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/10/transport-trip-p...
The android app more-or-less does it as well.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...
Emphasis on less. The Android implementation of the Hub is gimped compared to BB10. On BB10, tapping a conversation would open it directly in a sub-view, while on Android it acts more like an incomplete list of links, where clicking the link opens the app and breaks the back button. It's such a sub-par experience that I only use it for e-mail these days, where it excels (I haven't found anything better for email).
I can't wait for mobile support, although I noticed the plan is for Firefox users and I'm still stuck on Chrome.
I think a neat feature would be to group multiple sites together for a single individual. For example, following a web comic and connecting that with the artist's Twitter, as a single item.
I'm curious as to whether it keeps track of which items I've seen or whether it only has a staleness measure
It doesn't track unread items. This is a move away from the 'news feed' or 'inbox' approach to reading the Web.
I would really love to see a Mastodon (Fediverse?) client implementing it!
Congrats @ author!
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!
- Re: link colors. I think this is already the case for post titles. What platform did you try it on?
- Re: reordering tabs. I've put this in the queue. Thank you.
- Re: changing tabs. Part of this: https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/70
- Re: empty home tab. Good point. If home isn't wanted, maybe I make it go away... Hmm need to think about this.
- Re: graphs. I've added a tooltip in the next release and cleared up the logic. More improvements will come with the upcoming design.
- Re: keyboard shortcuts. https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/68
Thank you for the very thorough review! I hope these will improve over the next month.
No more walled gardens and network effect lock-in; people first, apps second.
Fantastic work.