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Here is a list of a few things I will probably make in the near future.
I’ve been using Fraidycat as my only web feed reader for a few months and I really like the idea behind it.
For those who don’t know about it, it’s pretty basic feed reader with a twist: instead of chronologically sorting the all entries in a giant timeline, each feed has its own section with its entries inside. You assign tags to each feed which serve as categories shown as tabs at the top of the interface. In addition to the list of entries, each feed gets a little marker of when the last entry was posted (as a relative date with color coding) and a pulse graph of the overall activity of the feed.
What I really love about this idea is that your reader never gets dominated by whoever posts the most. Each individual you follow gets the same screen space as every other, and you can quickly check the pulse of people you care about (and assess if you should contact them, if you see they haven’t posted anything in a month, for example).
The way I tag my feeds in Fraidycat was inspired by some blog post I read that talked about a theory on the limit of the human brain regarding the number of social contacts you could keep up with. Here is my list of categories:
My main gripe about Fraidycat is that is relies on a full blown web browser, it’s distributed as an addon for Firefox or Chrome, or a standalone on Electron, and the fact that it’s local: I can’t access it from elsewhere than my desktop computer.
Before that I was using Miniflux, which has its own merits. It’s a little server you can easily host yourself and access from anywhere. But it’s interface is just a giant timeline that I struggled to keep up with, especially since I follow quite a lot of Youtube, Twitter and Fediverse accounts.
So! My plan is to kind of mix them both: have a tiny hosted server that acts like Fraidycat and serve its output on Gemini, with client-certificate authentication. It would support Gemini (and Gopher) as a client as well of course, so that I can follow what people write on here too, without relying on CAPCOM. And it would allow me to read my feeds without opening a web browser, wherever I am.
Kind of like the social categories described above, but on the sending end: gemlogs with access control on posts, using client certificates, so that only chosen people can read them. The writer would define a set of circles on their server, each circle containing client-certificates hashes of the people allowed to read the posts targeted to their circle or other circles inside it. The innermost one would be fully public, the one around it would be for know people, the one around that would be for friends, etc.
I’m not sure it would really be interesting, especially since there aren’t a lot of people browsing Gemini space, but I’d like to give more thoughts to the idea at least. It would also require feed readers to implement client-certificates.
I’ve read about this in a few Gemlogs already and I want to give it a try:
Having an URL on this gemlog that requests as input a Gemini URL to a reply to one of my posts, to notify me about it. I know you can query GUS for backlinks, but I’m not a huge fan of centralized services, and I still have to manually check it.
The script would download the link that was sent to look for a link back to my domain. If it does contain one, it sends the reply link to me by email so I can read it, and decide whether or not to add it to a list of replies in my original post.
