6 ms·

Fraidycat: Follow from afar

191 points by ddtaylor 6y ago

syx 6y ago
I've been using this as my main RSS feed for 3 months now, it's really neat!
Kelamir 6y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878 [Show HN: FraidyCat, 800p]
petercooper 6y ago
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 https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/178 and https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/194 https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/194
- kickscondor 6y ago
  I'm sorry about this. I really need to improve this situation. Let me see what I can do today.
  - petercooper 6y ago
    No worries, I was very busy at the time I discovered it so I disabled and didn't have time to leap into the code as I should have. I imagine it's something quite simple. I love your projects! :-)
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
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.
y7 6y ago
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.
fooblat 6y ago
Really cool and brings me a wave of nostalgia for Mugshot[0]. 15 years ago Red Hat launched a similar service and it was great. Unfortunately it didn't catch on. 0. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6955-2/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6955-2/
rakoo 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - rakoo 6y ago
    It's probably related to some sort of FOMO: you're following someone on a website, so you want to know when they have something new to say. But then there's the other side of the coin where you get all news from all sources, and you get drowned in your inbox and must declare Email bankruptcy. We are lead to believe everything is important and we must be notified as soon as it happens but our brains are not wired for constant influx of information. This is also another reason I love Fraidycat: I _know_ it's fetching content a few times a day, so I don't need to check every 5 minutes. There's very little chance I'm going to miss anything critical if I only read about it a few days after it happened, and that's fine. It has reduced (slightly, ngl) my tendency to F5 on news sources and procrastination. I don't check as often for content, and when I do I know I'm going to spend some time on it. Thanks for pushing for more slow web, whether it was intentional or not :)
brunjact 6y ago
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.
bajsejohannes 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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.
  - bajsejohannes 6y ago
    I was thinking of the alternative being a website like google reader. Yes, you give up control of the data about your reading habits, but you know the scope of what you give up. For what it's worth, I agree that the traditional model gives up all control. I'm not a fan of that either, and I go to some lengths to isolate processes from each other. I certainly wish we had saner desktop OSes.
suifbwish 6y ago
Isn’t this what social mapper and the social engineering toolkit are for?
olah_1 6y ago
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.
nishparadox 6y ago
One of the best things about fraidycat is the video essay. brilliant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgA4GzRsldI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgA4GzRsldI
mutant 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - Qwuke 6y ago
    Kicks, fraidycat is great. Is there text anywhere of the current thoughts on what fraidycat 2: the desktop service may look like?
    - kickscondor 6y ago
      I've only posted some screenshots of interface improvements: https://fraidyc.at/blog/the-fraidiest-cat-you've-ever-known/ https://fraidyc.at/blog/the-fraidiest-cat-you've-ever-known/ https://fraidyc.at/blog/peaky-panels https://fraidyc.at/blog/peaky-panels https://fraidyc.at/blog/electronic-drawers-that's-all https://fraidyc.at/blog/electronic-drawers-that's-all In a nutshell, I moved away from Electron (which was a quick prototype anyway) and have built a local service with uWebSockets.js and a systray icon. Unfortunately for Fraidycat, I had an opportunity to collaborate with someone that I'd really been wanting to work with - so we've spent the last four months working on a blogging tool that's supposed to pair well with Fraidycat. But I will be back to Fraidycat in the next few months to finish. I appreciate your curiosity very much!
  - syncbehind 6y ago
    I'm so thankful for your work on this! I've been using rss-bridge to make these things meet in one coherent space, but this looks much more elegant!
kickscondor 6y ago
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.
- maxwelljoslyn 6y ago
  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.
  - kickscondor 6y ago
    Very much agree, Maxwell. Worked on this fork of elasticlunr.js for that purpose: https://github.com/kickscondor/elasticlunr.js https://github.com/kickscondor/elasticlunr.js
    - maxwelljoslyn 6y ago
      Thanks. :-) I'm happy to hear it and so are my carpal tunnel hands.
- mempko 6y ago
  Looks great. Just installed it. Already provides lots of value. Question, your github grid seems low energy recently. Working on anything cool in secret?
  - kickscondor 6y ago
    Yep - working on a project called Multiverse, about to come out. Thanks for asking. :relaxed: If you want a peek, our day-to-day diary is here: https://futureland.tv/glitchyowl/multiverse-diary https://futureland.tv/glitchyowl/multiverse-diary
0xADADA 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Same here! I've used it for a year and I barely ever go on any social media except hackernews.
reidjs 6y ago
Is there a list of social media sites supported by fraidycat somewhere?
- sodimel 6y ago
  every website with a rss feed I think
  - rakoo 6y ago
    And if it doesn't have one, it can probably be worked out: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
- kickscondor 6y ago
  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 https://fraidyc.at/defs/social.json
nsilvestri 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 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.
themusicgod1 6y ago
> source code posted behind the NSA/Microsoft walled garden not acceptable
- kickscondor 6y ago
  It's a virus, carefully placed at the center of their maze.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
briefcomment 6y ago
I would like to request a Safari extension if possible.
neolog 6y ago
I have a long list of RSS and Atom urls. How can I get them into this program?
- kickscondor 6y ago
  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.)

191 points by ddtaylor 6y ago

syx 6y ago

I've been using this as my main RSS feed for 3 months now, it's really neat!

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878 [Show HN: FraidyCat, 800p]

petercooper 6y ago

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 https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/178 and https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/194 https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/194

kickscondor 6y ago
I'm sorry about this. I really need to improve this situation. Let me see what I can do today.
- petercooper 6y ago
  No worries, I was very busy at the time I discovered it so I disabled and didn't have time to leap into the code as I should have. I imagine it's something quite simple. I love your projects! :-)

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

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.

y7 6y ago

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.

fooblat 6y ago

Really cool and brings me a wave of nostalgia for Mugshot[0]. 15 years ago Red Hat launched a similar service and it was great. Unfortunately it didn't catch on. 0. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6955-2/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6955-2/

rakoo 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
- rakoo 6y ago
  It's probably related to some sort of FOMO: you're following someone on a website, so you want to know when they have something new to say. But then there's the other side of the coin where you get all news from all sources, and you get drowned in your inbox and must declare Email bankruptcy. We are lead to believe everything is important and we must be notified as soon as it happens but our brains are not wired for constant influx of information. This is also another reason I love Fraidycat: I _know_ it's fetching content a few times a day, so I don't need to check every 5 minutes. There's very little chance I'm going to miss anything critical if I only read about it a few days after it happened, and that's fine. It has reduced (slightly, ngl) my tendency to F5 on news sources and procrastination. I don't check as often for content, and when I do I know I'm going to spend some time on it. Thanks for pushing for more slow web, whether it was intentional or not :)

brunjact 6y ago

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.

bajsejohannes 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
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 6y ago
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.
- bajsejohannes 6y ago
  I was thinking of the alternative being a website like google reader. Yes, you give up control of the data about your reading habits, but you know the scope of what you give up. For what it's worth, I agree that the traditional model gives up all control. I'm not a fan of that either, and I go to some lengths to isolate processes from each other. I certainly wish we had saner desktop OSes.

suifbwish 6y ago

Isn’t this what social mapper and the social engineering toolkit are for?

olah_1 6y ago

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.

nishparadox 6y ago

One of the best things about fraidycat is the video essay. brilliant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgA4GzRsldI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgA4GzRsldI

mutant 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
- Qwuke 6y ago
  Kicks, fraidycat is great. Is there text anywhere of the current thoughts on what fraidycat 2: the desktop service may look like?
  - kickscondor 6y ago
    I've only posted some screenshots of interface improvements: https://fraidyc.at/blog/the-fraidiest-cat-you've-ever-known/ https://fraidyc.at/blog/the-fraidiest-cat-you've-ever-known/ https://fraidyc.at/blog/peaky-panels https://fraidyc.at/blog/peaky-panels https://fraidyc.at/blog/electronic-drawers-that's-all https://fraidyc.at/blog/electronic-drawers-that's-all In a nutshell, I moved away from Electron (which was a quick prototype anyway) and have built a local service with uWebSockets.js and a systray icon. Unfortunately for Fraidycat, I had an opportunity to collaborate with someone that I'd really been wanting to work with - so we've spent the last four months working on a blogging tool that's supposed to pair well with Fraidycat. But I will be back to Fraidycat in the next few months to finish. I appreciate your curiosity very much!
- syncbehind 6y ago
  I'm so thankful for your work on this! I've been using rss-bridge to make these things meet in one coherent space, but this looks much more elegant!

kickscondor 6y ago

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.

maxwelljoslyn 6y ago
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.
- kickscondor 6y ago
  Very much agree, Maxwell. Worked on this fork of elasticlunr.js for that purpose: https://github.com/kickscondor/elasticlunr.js https://github.com/kickscondor/elasticlunr.js
  - maxwelljoslyn 6y ago
    Thanks. :-) I'm happy to hear it and so are my carpal tunnel hands.
mempko 6y ago
Looks great. Just installed it. Already provides lots of value. Question, your github grid seems low energy recently. Working on anything cool in secret?
- kickscondor 6y ago
  Yep - working on a project called Multiverse, about to come out. Thanks for asking. :relaxed: If you want a peek, our day-to-day diary is here: https://futureland.tv/glitchyowl/multiverse-diary https://futureland.tv/glitchyowl/multiverse-diary

0xADADA 6y ago

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 6y ago
Same here! I've used it for a year and I barely ever go on any social media except hackernews.

reidjs 6y ago

Is there a list of social media sites supported by fraidycat somewhere?

sodimel 6y ago
every website with a rss feed I think
- rakoo 6y ago
  And if it doesn't have one, it can probably be worked out: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
kickscondor 6y ago
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 https://fraidyc.at/defs/social.json

nsilvestri 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 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.

themusicgod1 6y ago

> source code posted behind the NSA/Microsoft walled garden not acceptable

kickscondor 6y ago
It's a virus, carefully placed at the center of their maze.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

briefcomment 6y ago

I would like to request a Safari extension if possible.

neolog 6y ago

I have a long list of RSS and Atom urls. How can I get them into this program?

kickscondor 6y ago
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.)