Show HN: Fraidycat

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.

Great project, very clever

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.

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.

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.