2019.11.06 - HN: Fraidycat

Reply: 2019.11.06 - HN: Fraidycat

Fraidycat is a delightful browser extension for following people on the interwebs. Roughly, it’s an easy-to-use yet hackable, user-owned, FOSS, privacy-respecting, and experimental next-generation feed aggregator and reader. Not every platform offers RSS, so Fraidycat tries to build those bridges for you, scraping and packaging it up for you automagically, allowing you to tailor your own feeds, priorities, and timelines from across the web in your browser.

This is really helpful, h0p3!! Krikey, you’re such a friend.

Hear ye, hear ye. Tolle, lege; tolle, lege. Srsly, hyperbolic skiddie fanboi gushing here, so ignore me at-will, plz:

Haha, oh imagine if this was what you had to do to play well in the HN crowd. (This actually reminds me of that amazing story from The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem where the robots all speak Chaucerian English.)

Don’t let the frisky aesthetic of this gem fool ya: underneath the hood is essentially an engine which is necessary (even if insufficient) for a functioning democracy, for treating people not as mere means but as ends, and for fixing the problems of the centralization of infrastructures and processes which commodify our attention spans. It’s a spicy tool for the people and about the people. It sprankles your browser with mana, dope maymays, and the people you like or love (or don’t, ;P).

Omgz - I hate to play into your hyperbole here, but I think you’re right. (Don’t get me wrong - this is a shit tool.) This “having a personal engine to negotiate your link to others” is maybe the whole of it. (For some reason, I was thinking it was the simplistic non-feed view, purely an organization thing.)

The problem is that I need the networks to play well in some sense - I at least need to have access to scrape HTML fragments. But these networks will always fight back against that. We have to accept that. Fraidycat will need to be incredibly resilient and aggressive - like Stuxnet or like PRISM.

When you think about it, though, it’s ridiculous that this needs to be done. It’s insane! Civilian counterops.

It’s rad that you took the time to vocalize your angle. I need to internalize this, because there is further direction and understanding in this. I don’t fully understand what I’m doing - I absolutely thirst for these sick angles from other fields of view.

UUUUUHHHPDATE: Just saw Le Reddit Log. Holy shit - you are a madman. Buggin out over here.

Damn man oh man - not sure I’m ready for this!!

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