Tool Spotlight - Fraidycat
Changing it up for today's blog post to talk about something I've been excitedly spending potentially way too much time on lately: the Fraidycat app/web extension!
Fraidycat is a tool developed by Kicks Condor for following updates across various online platforms. Rather than showing everything through an overall news feed or inbox of updates, Fraidycat lists updates according to the actual people you follow. If you want to subscribe to updates from someone on multiple platforms, you can do that, too, of course (eg: being able to receive all of the distinct updates from someone's Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr accounts.) It allows you to sort individuals, and their updates, into your own custom tags/categories however you like. As one might expect, it supports the following of conventional RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds (and therefore supports any site that already includes these), and is also supposed to be able to fetch updates from sites that don't traditionally offer feed support. I only say "supposed to" because I haven't tested it all out myself, and also haven't seen any recent development updates on whether that support is still in place. But from the GitHub page for Fraidycat, I was pretty intrigued at seeing sites like Tiktok, Twitch, Bandcamp, Steam, and Patreon also included. Personally, I've been the most intrigued by whether or not it's still possible for Instagram and Twitter updates to work properly with Fraidycat. Both are listed as possible for Fraidycat to support, but my recent attempts to add them have yielded mixed results, sometimes working properly while at other times not showing the most recent updates. That being said, it's so far been a pretty smooth process to receive updates from sites like Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, various news websites, and other classic blogging platforms.
With this fresh blog and the accompanying push it gives me to delve deeper into blogging culture and the sort of DIY-alternative-internet-spirit that it encourages, it's been enlightening to fiddle with RSS feeds and such for the first time. And now that I've made my first foray into it, all I can think is: why didn't I ever try this out sooner? I'm hooked on it! Further tweaking will be needed to get things working more precisely to my preference, but it's absolutely the thing that has come closest to allowing me to stay conveniently updated on things of interest, something that my social media usage has otherwise provided in the past. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm really enjoying it so far.