The idea

I want to build an app, in which you can subscribe or follow profiles or feeds from multiple platforms, including various fediverse platforms (lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, etc), blogs, and others (no idea what else yet).

App will have optional smart filtering and sorting, and optional algorithm based on your reading habits.

The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from. It should feel like a lemmy app if you see a lemmy post, feel like Mastodon if it’s Mastodon, etc. This is obviously a monumental effort, so I will have to make concessions (hence north star).

Motivation

I see the recession of multi-source or Multi-Platform feed readers (RSS) as quite unfortunate to user choice and freedom.

I think this app, will promote a few ideals of mine:

  • being intentional about content we want on our feed
  • breaking boundary between different platforms (which is the spirit of ActivityPub)
  • promoting open platforms: encourage non-profitting creators to make their content accessible on these platforms, and readers to read from them.
  • consuming internet content without data mining, addictive scrolling, and having the choice to smart filter or sort your feed.

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What are your thoughts? Do you agree that this is worthwhile?

Besides blog posts (RSS), lemmy, Mastodon, and other big fsdiverse platforms, what would you want to see on this app?

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    4·
    5 hours ago

    The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from

    This is the exact opposite of what I’m working on. My idea is to embrace “Protocols, not platforms” and treat all the different places are sources of content (like RSS) but with the added two-way interactivity that is enabled by ActivityPub and Linked Data.

    So of course the UI will need to adapt: threaded discussion forums would be presented in a different way in relation to long form blog feeds. But luckily this is already part of the benefits from Linked Data. A Lemmy post is presented in the Fediverse as https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Page, and each response is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#note, while a blog entry from WriteFreely is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Article and an video from PeerTube is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Video… this information about the object type should be enough for us to figure out the best way to handle the UI.

    what would you want to see on this app?

    Believe it or not, I would like to have a read-only view of the Big Tech feeds. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook posts from your friends, all of that crap. Like what GrayJay is doing. The idea though would be not to interact with it, but to have a way to people to ease their way out into the open alternatives.