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?
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 ahttps://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#note, while a blog entry from WriteFreely is ahttps://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Articleand an video from PeerTube is ahttps://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.
Would love to see a project like this take hold that is floss and community supported. Both Surf and Tapestry are interesting in this area but sadly proprietary.
Those are both Apple only
I use an iPhone and a Mac but I assume Android as a more open platform has even more of those.
To have an aggregation tool that could seamlessly put together such different environments would awesome, but the scope can be a bit too overarching at first. My suggestion, having seen the progress of another aggregation platform (mainly for video/audio), Grayjay, is to proceed slowly at creating integrations, as effort to maintain them is potentially exponential, and then, when you feel comfortable managing the ones you already made, proceed to the next.
And unrelated, but is RSS truly shrinking? I found out about it some 1~2 years ago, and unless it’s due to me using this type of technology for so little time, but it feels far more are made or keep existing than there are feeds being killed. Worse part for finding the feeds is that often they are hidden in the page’s source code.
It’s a lot less common to see prominent links to RSS feeds on a website these days than it was, say, fifteen years ago.
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Those exist. We need something to make subscribing easier.
I do, I’ve been music for a while about an app that had all my fediverse accounts in one place, a long with my email and possibly reddit (but, uh, without ads). I never check my email unless I’m expecting something and I think a big part of why is because it’s a separate flow from checking my other text-based social media.
Email is a great addition, I didn’t consider that one. Thanks for that!
I’d love to add reddit and other big social medias even, but their restrictive access policies aren’t very promising.
Don’t even bother, next thing you know they remove API access and you lost hours of work.
