
Show HN: Fraidycat - kickscondor
https://fraidyc.at/
======
kickscondor
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.

~~~
atroche
I think you're exploring an important space here. Good luck!

Also, the video essay you made about this
([https://youtu.be/zgA4GzRsldI](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.

~~~
gbasin
I felt the same. I almost never watch product videos, and I watched this one
all the way through... very well done.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
over-produced. not raw and real.

~~~
h00dui
It's fun & pretty raw. It's also a great way to talk about the intention of
this product.

------
reggieband
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.

~~~
GrinningFool

        > 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

BlackBerry hub did this under BBOS10.

The android app more-or-less does it as well.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub&hl=en_US)

~~~
yantrams
Meego OS had it too.

~~~
Fnoord
Yep, and Telepathy (based on Pidgin aka GAIM). In a way, Pidgin and its
predecessors of multi IM clients also did this.

------
nanna
I love this.

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!

~~~
kickscondor
\- Working on this.
[https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/50](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/50)

\- 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](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](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/68)

Thank you for the very thorough review! I hope these will improve over the
next month.

~~~
Quanttek
Re home: Maybe split it into two: an "uncategorized" tab and an "all" tab

------
fenwick67
> 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.

~~~
twic
I saw someone suggest this as a UI for Twitter a while ago. Can't remember
where. But yes, it sounds brilliant!

~~~
ehsankia
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.

------
isoprophlex
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.

Fantastic work.

------
overshard
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).

~~~
kickscondor
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!

~~~
Nikaoto
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 :-)

------
sairamkunala
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed)

They created and later opensourced Tornado(Python based HTTP framework for
handling large number of threads)

~~~
czottmann
I remember! Pouring one out for FF right now.

------
code_duck
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.

------
whichquestion
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.

~~~
kickscondor
Ok - this sounds interesting. Can you describe it in more detail? Or like give
me a practical example? Always glad to toss around ideas.

~~~
greycol
I believe they're advocating for an 'advanced search' type page. Something
like these:

[https://www.novelupdates.com/series-
finder/](https://www.novelupdates.com/series-finder/)
[https://www.google.com/advanced_search](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.

------
CitrusFruits
I'm so in.

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
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.

Thank you for the encouragement!

------
joantune
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..

------
goblin89
Fraidycat is the first piece of open-source software I noticed using Blue Oak
Model License.

~~~
runxel
Nice! Didn't even know this exists.

I'm a bit confused, tho: the only real content is:

> This license gives everyone as much permission to work with this software as
> possible, while protecting contributors from liability.

This doesn't really sound unambiguous to me (but maybe that's because English
is not my native language). As comparison from The Unlicense:

> Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute
> this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any
> purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

Somehow that's much clearer to me.

~~~
roryokane
The Purpose paragraph you quoted from
[https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/blob/master/LICENSE...](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/blob/master/LICENSE.md)
is far from “the only real content”. That paragraph is a statement of intent,
not a compression of the details into one sentence. It’s not supposed to be
unambiguous. The next seven paragraphs on Acceptance, Copyright, Notices,
Excuse, Patent, Reliability, and No Liability are the actual rules of the
license.

The Blue Oak Model License aims to be closer to the MIT License than to the
Unlicense. The Unlicense releases the software into the public domain, which
means, for example, that someone who makes a derivative work could release
that work under a proprietary license. In contrast, the Notices section of the
Blue Oak Model License, just like the third paragraph of the MIT License,
requires derivative works to be released under the same license. I would say
the Blue Oak Model License uses the idea of “freedom through self-imposed
restrictions” more than both the Unlicense and the MIT License.

I think the biggest difference between the MIT License and the Blue Oak Model
License is that the MIT License doesn’t mention patents, which (some lawyers
think) could allow authors of MIT-Licensed software to sue users for violating
their patents used by the software. The Blue Oak Model License’s Patent
section closes that loophole.

------
hrdwdmrbl
Too bad Activity Stream
([https://www.w3.org/Social/](https://www.w3.org/Social/) and
[https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-
core/](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/)) never succeeded or else
your project would be easy for anyone to implement.

~~~
fenwick67
There's ActivityPub
([https://activitypub.rocks/](https://activitypub.rocks/)). Not that it's
perfect.

------
yunusabd
FYI Someone put this on product hunt:
[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/fraidycat](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/fraidycat)

------
pletsch
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.

------
dmitshur
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!

[1]: [https://github.com/shurcooL-legacy/latest-
tweets](https://github.com/shurcooL-legacy/latest-tweets)

------
newtoday
This is awesome! The design / branding itself is pleasantly unique and fun!

@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
For feed sharing, here's where I'm putting ideas:
[https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/6](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/6)

Thank you for the nice words.

------
pkamb
> I use it to follow people

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/](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.

~~~
kickscondor
This is a brilliant concept. Hosts could keep a feed of their appearances, but
it would be interesting for someone to make a site that tracked this sort of
thing (using user-submitted links I suppose).

~~~
chrisaldrich
[https://huffduffer.com/](https://huffduffer.com/) is another good
discovery/bookmarking tool for podcasts. It has RSS feeds for everything on
the site including custom searches that could potentially pick up your
favorite contributors. The bookmarking functionality also makes it easy for
you to quickly add things you find to one or more followable feeds for the
one-off guest appearances you may hear about. (Originally posted at
boffosocko.com/2020/03/21/55769517/)

------
boznz
"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.

------
z0mbie42
Wow, this idea of grouping messages is really great!

I would really love to see a Mastodon (Fediverse?) client implementing it!

Congrats @ author!

------
crispyporkbites
Nice, great design as well, is this a standard theme?

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?

~~~
kickscondor
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](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/99)

~~~
crispyporkbites
You don't need to send anything back to the server for this, just a local
parser based on the URL.

Although the permissions system gives you access to all sites.

------
AbraKdabra
Whoa, that video is a whole trip on its own.

------
Jarwain
I love the idea, I think it's Really Clever.

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

~~~
kickscondor
Re: grouping. This is a feature called "bundling" that I'm halfway through
finishing.
[https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/63](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/63)

It doesn't track unread items. This is a move away from the 'news feed' or
'inbox' approach to reading the Web.

------
listic
I wish there was a way to follow someone's posts on, say, Twitter, but _not_
re-posts. Is there an easy way to do that?

~~~
kickscondor
Is this something you would want as a global option? Or would you do it on a
case-by-case? I'm tempted to just add a "Show Reposts" in the filtering menu.
That seems perhaps more useful (to me) than having to manage individual
settings.

~~~
listic
I think a global option in the filtering menu would be just fine.

------
giancarlostoro
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.

------
Neff
I was just looking for something like this - a way to aggregate all my chosen
feeds across multiple services.

It sort of feels like the next iteration of Fever[1]

[1] - [https://feedafever.com/](https://feedafever.com/)

------
fishbacon
This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately, the way stuff gets
to me. This might actually be what I was thinking about.

Exciting times when something you thought you would have to build falls in
your lap.

I might contribute to this, thanks for making it :)

------
calmchaos
Feedbro is better with more social media integration support.
[https://nodetics.com/feedbro/](https://nodetics.com/feedbro/)

------
listic
What does it mean there's no online sync for the binaries?

~~~
kickscondor
The extensions will sync your list of follows between computers. So if you are
logged in to Chrome on your work computer and you subscribe to dezz.ie, it'll
show up when you log in to Chrome at home.

~~~
kyleee
Is there import/export functionality?

~~~
kickscondor
Yes - in OPML and JSON.

------
Krasnol
Is there a way to actually add account login data so you can grab feeds from
users who are not visible if not logged in? I see that happening on Instagram
for example.

~~~
kickscondor
This is in the plan.
[https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/9](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/9)

Just wanted to ensure the concept was solid before venturing into it. Also
concerned about storage of credentials.

~~~
Krasnol
Perfect.

Thank you. I really like it :)

------
rukuu001
I love this.

\- I love the way it looks

\- I love what it does

\- I love that it introduced me to philosophy.life

------
aWidebrant
I like this a lot. It feels like a much healthier starting point than diving
head first into the discovery feeds of the platforms.

------
jdpigeon
I would really really love this for mobile. 90% of my mindless browsing that
I'd like to take control of happens on my phone.

~~~
kickscondor
This is huge for me too. You can follow progress here:
[https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/31](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/31)

------
bovermyer
I love this. I've been looking for something to solve this particular problem
for awhile now. Thanks!

------
chrischen
This reminds me of MSN Messenger. Back then people abused the nickname feature
to write a status message.

~~~
solstice
I think this was used in Skype as well during the mid 00s

------
technics256
Wow. The video and everything is extremely impressive. Are you an artist also?
If not, you should be.

------
dmamills
Very cool idea and fun execution!

------
minusSeven
I am getting a networkError when attempting to fetch resource on any instagram
links...

~~~
kickscondor
This is likely due to Firefox 'Strict' Tracking Protection. If you are okay
turning it down to 'Standard', it will be fine.
[https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/26](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/26)

Not sure how to solve this. Firefox thinks Fraidycat is "calling home".

------
verumn
I'm intrigued by what's going on in the "Internet K-Hole"

~~~
floren
Posting found photographs, unless they've changed the site completely. It's
fascinating at times, but frequently NSFW.

~~~
twic
A similar sort of thing (though usually SFW) crops up on r/oldschoolcool, eg:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/fgi66k/my_da...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/fgi66k/my_dad_casually_grilling_my_brother_circa_1995/)

------
xvector
This is amazing, I've been wanting something like this for a long time!

------
ccktlmazeltov
feature request: I tried adding decrypt.co and could not, and then I couldn't
leave the page to add a new thing.

~~~
kickscondor
Ok - thank you. I'll sort this out!

------
celim307
Great project, very clever

------
gto16108
“Why do you have to bring cats into this?”

Sincerely, Angela from The Office

------
andrewstuart
This site should say what it is, right up front.

~~~
kickscondor
My strategy is to build curiosity.

------
huxflux
I'm in love with this!

------
dazuaz
No spacing on top of the video almost killed me

------
vasergen
Wow, love it

------
mcrump
Your YT promo video needs to get to the point much much faster. 45 seconds
tops. Save the cuteness for later or another video.

~~~
kickscondor
This is the cuteness video. There is no other video.

------
65934
Literally the worst landing page and copy i"ve seen

Bruh You gotta improve this

