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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.

                         /||
                         \ \\
        ,_       _,     _/ //
        |\\_____/||----- ____\
        |        |_------     |  :. :.
        |  {}{}  |            |
        |  =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

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 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.