A most pathetic surveillance tool.
I have been dumping time into Fraidycat—the tool I use to monitor the Web
(blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Soundcloud, what have you)—in an effort to really
increase my ability to stay up on reading you all. I’m going to be releasing
Fraidycat on Nov 4th—but you shouldn’t feel any obligation to use it, because
it’s geared toward my own purposes, but I hope it might inspire someone out
there to design even better ‘post-feed’ tools for reading the Web.
Just a heads up, though. It sucks. Here’s why:
- It can only be used either as a web extension or a Dat website.
- Its ‘syncing’ powers are limited—so if I am using it on Firefox on one
machine, I’ll need to use Firefox (and the same account) on another machine
to keep my ‘follows’ in sync.
- You can’t post from it or anything, which is terrible.
- Fetching philosopher.life freezes the whole extension for like a minute.
The reason it sucks is because I am trying to make it an independent tool—it
shouldn’t rely on a central website at all. (It also sucks because I suck, duh!)
The fortunate thing, though, about right now—is that everything else sucks, too!
We traded all these glorious personal websites in for a handful of shitty
networks that everyone hates. So using Fraidycat is actually a nice breath of
somewhat non-shitty air, because you can follow people on all of those networks
without needing to immerse yourself in their awfulness.
Here is what it looks like today:
So, yes, it does reward recency. But not as much as most platforms do. No one
can just spam your feed. Yeah, they can bump themselves up to the top of the
list, but that’s it. And, if I need to bump someone down manually, I can move
them to the ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’ areas.
Imagine not needing to open all of these different networks. I tire of needing
to open all of these separate apps: Marco Polo, Twitter, Instagram. My dream is
that people can use the platforms they want and I don’t have to have accounts
for them all—I can just follow from afar. Gah, one day.
The Shittiest Thing
And, actually, the worst part is that all of these sites are tough to crack into.
For most blogs, I use RSS. No problem—works great. Wish I didn’t have to poll
periodically—wish I could use Websockets (or Dat’s ‘live’ feature)—but not
bad at all.
For Soundcloud and Twitter, I have to scrape the HTML. I’m even trying to get
Facebook (m.facebook.com) scraping working for public pages. But this is going
to be a tough road—keeping these scrapers functional. It sucks!
I wish there was more pressure on these sites to offer some kind of API or
syndication. But it’s just abyssmal—it’s a kind of Dark Ages out there for
this kind of thing. But I think that tools like this can help apply pressure on
sites. I mean imagine if everyone started using ‘reader-like’ tools—this would
further development down the RSS road.
I should say that I think we can do better than RSS. Or maybe just—we need
more extensions. A few I’d like to see:
- A ‘live’ metadata tag. This could be of use on Twitch streams, for instance, to
say whether the stream is ‘live’ right now. Also perhaps a time for how long
the stream has been live and when it ends.
- Metadata for pinned posts or sitewide bulletins. Perhaps the site will be down
for two months due to a medical emergency or vacation or something. It would
be nice to have post(s) that could be flagged as an important PSA or
something.
- Metadata for drafts or hidden material. I hide quite a lot of posts on my
site, mostly comments to other blogs—and I notice Sphygmus has been doing
this as well with TiddlyWiki. Sure you can offer multiple feeds. But I would
love it if Fraidycat could said: “Sphygmus has 13 recent hidden posts—here
are some sample titles—are you interested in seeing these as well?”
- Oh and I’m seeing more people doing public drafting and I used to not get it,
but now I do, and it would be nice to mark drafts in the titles.
- For purely video content—like let’s say someday TikTok or Instagram stories
could offer a feed—it would be nice to have a reasonable way to do this!
Otherwise RSS will never be an option there.
I will get back to my other projects (indieweb.xyz, my href hunts) once this is
released. I really appreciate Jason McIntosh’s recent post about
Bumpyskies,
partly because I just like to read about personal projects—and it’s difficult to
write about them because self-promotion has become quite shameful—however, I
don’t know how we get out of the current era of corpypastas without personal
software that makes an attempt at progress.
Reply: Yes, I Still Answer E-mails
Ok, wow—this is interesting. First off, I feel so fortunate to have discovered your page right when you are starting! Thank you for the reply—right off I can see why e-mail is so appealing to you, as it strips away anything but our words to each other. There are no graphics to try to dazzle you with or any distractions from just our sentiments to each other. I realize now that I haven’t used e-mail much recently. I mean—tell me what you get out of e-mail. Am I close?
I’m very curious how people have found you. I think I found you through an are.na page that listed a bunch of simple, fascinating web pages—and yours was one. (Don’t ask me what are.na is—I am not really sure! I fell into it!) How do you let people know about such a page if you have no contact with the “social” sites? I couldn’t find a link on Reddit, for instance. (I ask this because one of the troubles with the Web right now is the inability to find smaller sites now that they are drowned out in the search results—and posting your own links on Reddit is seen as self-promotion.) Yet, people are finding you! It’s great!
Oh also, I really like the idea of you answering e-mails as a profession or as a community position or something like that. Do you see yourself as a kind of telephone operator at the switchboard? Or would this position be more a counselor—in the way that a counselor provides comfort and support—perhaps reliable, regular conversation?
Whatever the case, I can’t help but feel that it is a generous cause you are gained in, Brynn. Very antimisanthropic, for sure! - kicks