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https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat

Follow blogs, wikis, YouTube channels, as well as accounts on Twitter, Instagram, etc. from a single page.
https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat

Last synced: 6 days ago
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Follow blogs, wikis, YouTube channels, as well as accounts on Twitter, Instagram, etc. from a single page.

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README 

        
**Note: this main branch represents the upcoming FRAIDYCAT 2 - which is not 

quite there - to access the stable branch (the web extension), please see

the [v1.1 branch](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/tree/v1.1).**



                             /||

                             \ \\

            ,_       _,     _/ //

            |\\_____/||----- ____\

            |        |_------     |  :. :.

            |  {}{}  |            |

            |  =v=   |        ___ |  fraidycat

            |   ^    | _------ | ||

            | ,----, ||    ||| | ||  follow from afar

            | ||   | ||    ||| | ||

            | ||   | ||    ||' | ||  ~ blogs, wikis ~

            | ||   | ||        '-'      ~ twitter, reddit, insta, yt, etc ~

            | ||   | ||

            '-''   '-''                            :. :.



**Fraidycat** is an app for Linux, Windows or Mac OS X - but which can be

accessed from a local browser or a Tor onion site - and is a tool

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.



**[Release links coming soon.]**



Here is my Fraidycat home page from October 25th, 2019:



![My Fraidycat home page](https://fraidyc.at/images/fraidycat-oct2019.png)



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 eat up CPU time.

* **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.

* **Tiktok.** Believe it!

* **Facebook.** Public pages only.

* **Twitch.** Including whether a streamer is 'live'!

* **Twitter.** On older versions of Firefox, the Strict Tracking Protection

  may block this.

* **Instagram.** Public accounts only, currently.

* **SoundCloud and Bandcamp.** Spotify and Apple Music are not presently

  supported.

* **Kickstarter, Patreon, Pinterest, Tumblr, Steam, Are.na** and more!



Feel free to file an issue for any site you want added - I will try to help

you!



### 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



### Building the Thing



If you're checking out the code from Github, make sure you've installed

[git-lfs](https://git-lfs.github.com) first. Then, clone normally.



Then, to build the app, use:



    npm install

    npm run build



To force building a package for a different platform, pass in the platform

name through the `PLATFORM` environment variable.



    PLATFORM=win npm run build



### License



Fraidycat is distributed under the Blue Oak Model License 1.0.0.

Read it [here](LICENSE.md).