/, \ \
,_ _, _/ //, \_____/, ----- ____, _------, :. :., {}{}, =v=, ___, fraidycat, ^, _------, ,----,, follow from afar, ', ~ blogs, wikis ~, '-' ~ twitter, reddit, insta, yt, etc ~, '-'' '-'' :. :.
Fraidycat is a browser extension for Firefox or Chrome - or an Electron
app - that can be used to follow folks on a variety of platforms. But rather
than showing you a traditional 'inbox' or 'feed' view of all the incoming
posts - Fraidycat braces itself against this unbridled firehose! - you are
shown an overview of who is active and a brief summary of their activity.
- Official Add-on for Firefox:
Download - Official Extension for Chrome:
Download - Official Packages for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X:
Download
Here is my Fraidycat home page from October 25th, 2019:
Fraidycat attempts to dissolve the barriers between networks - each with their
own seeming 'network effects' - and forms a personal network for you, a personal
surveillance network, if you will, of the people you want to monitor. (It's as if
the Web itself is now your network - imagine that.)
There are no fancy algorithms behind Fraidycat - everything is organized by
recency. (Although, you can sort follows into tags and priority - "do I want to
track this person in real-time? Is this a band that I am only interested in checking
in on once a year?") For once, the point isn't for the tool to discern your
intent from your behavior; the point is for you to wield the tool, as if you
are a rather capable kind of human being.
Features
Follows are arranged by tag - each can have multiple tags - the tabbed bar
along the top of the main page lets you select the tag to view. You then narrow
down by importance - tags can be checked in 'real-time' or 'daily', 'weekly',
'monthly' and 'yearly'.
Follows are shown in dark green if they have been updated in the past two days,
a plain cyan if they are up to a month old and in an unassuming light brown if they
are over a month old. A small graph of activity over the past year is displayed - in
pink (if showing the previous two months of activity) or in gray (if
showing the past six months.)
Fraidycat is quite light on features - I am mostly focused on making sure that
it supports a lot of different sites and that it safely syncs between your
different computers.
Follow Support
Here is a current list of what is fully supported:
- Feeds (RSS, Atom, JSON Feed). It will discover any feeds attached to the
URL you supply. Many sites not listed (like Mastodon, micro.blog,
Wikipedia, Kickstarter or Stack Overflow) will automatically work because
of this. (ALL SITES SHOULD SUPPORT THIS COME ON FRIENDS! IT'S TOO EASY!) - TiddlyWiki. As odd as this seems, I use this heavily to follow wikis
like philosopher.life and wiki.waifu.haus. The entire wiki is read every time
it changes - so be aware that this can cause some strain on the extension. - Pinboard, YouTube and Reddit. These sites offer RSS feeds, but they are
not discoverable (in the meta tags), so there is some logic to figure out
these feeds for you. - Twitter. Be aware that, if you follow too many Twitter users, you might
get flagged as a bot. I am looking into just using your credentials to load
from a 'list' - but I am unsure if this would be seen as overreaching on my
part. - Instagram. Public accounts only, currently.
- SoundCloud. Would also like to support Bandcamp at some point.
Working on support for:
- Facebook. Public pages only.
- Twitch. Including whether a streamer is 'live'. (Also need to offer this
for YouTube channels, of course.) - Songkick. I personally need this. Already seems possible, by way of
acousti.co, but I don't like relying on
secondary services.
Feel free to file an issue for any site you want added - I will try to help
you!
Sync Support
The only way to sync your follows at the moment is through your browser account.
So, if you are using Firefox, you must be signed in as the same user with the
same browser and Fraidycat installed on both machines.
Sync support is not sophisticated! It cannot do complex merging of changes.
It also may take a few minutes for a browser to update from a sync.
You can really only get sync support if you install from an official web store
or if you install from source in Chrome.
Be aware that each browser will fetch feeds independently - so they may fall out
of sync as they try to stay updated. However, every time you add or edit or
remove a follow, your other computers will be notified.
Importance
Fraidycat lets you assign an 'importance' to your feeds. They are:
- Real-time. ("Keep me as up-to-date as you can.") Currently, this checks
the follow every 5-10 minutes. - Daily. ("I usually just check in as part of a morning routine.") Fraidycat
will actually check this every 1-2 hours. - Weekly and Monthly. ("My visits here are only occassional" or "This follow doesn't
update much.") Checks are done at least once a day. - Yearly. ("I don't keep up with this, but I don't want to lose it either.")
Also checked at least once a day. So, when you get around to checking these,
they should be up-to-date.
Fraidycat attempts to send ETags and Last-Modified headers so that feeds aren't
actually refetched if they haven't changed.
Installation
Presently I really only encourage use of Fraidycat as a web extension for
Firefox and Chrome. (I also use it with Vivaldi - works great.) The Electron
app works, but lacks support for syncing between machines, which is rather
crucial. I also have a proof-of-concept Dat website - but Beaker still
needs to release some fixes I have submitted - only then I will feel okay
promoting it on the Dat network.
Building the Firefox / Chrome Web Extension
If you're checking out the code from Github, make sure you've installed
git-lfs first. Then, clone normally.
Then, to build the web extension, use:
npm install
npm run webext
npm run webext:safe
(The final step eliminates some code that triggers Mozilla's security scan.
This code is unused by Fraidycat and is included by its dependencies.)
The extension will appear in a build/webext folder. You can then load that
"unpacked" extension from the browser - as a 'temporary add-on', for example,
in Firefox.
To use Fraidycat, click on the 'F' icon in the browser toolbar.
(Be aware that syncing may not work when using the extension in this way - it
does in Chrome, though.)
Building the Windows / Max / Linux Standalone
If you're checking out the code from Github, make sure you've installed
git-lfs first. Then, clone normally.
Then, to build the Electron app:
npm install -D
npm run electron:mac
(or: npm run electron:windows)
(or: npm run electron:linux)
A dist directory will contain the appropriate installers.
(Syncing is not supported in the standalone apps yet.)
License
Fraidycat is distributed under the Blue Oak Model License 1.0.0.
Read it here.