The idea

I want to build an app, in which you can subscribe or follow profiles or feeds from multiple platforms, including various fediverse platforms (lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, etc), blogs, and others (no idea what else yet).

App will have optional smart filtering and sorting, and optional algorithm based on your reading habits.

The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from. It should feel like a lemmy app if you see a lemmy post, feel like Mastodon if it’s Mastodon, etc. This is obviously a monumental effort, so I will have to make concessions (hence north star).

Motivation

I see the recession of multi-source or Multi-Platform feed readers (RSS) as quite unfortunate to user choice and freedom.

I think this app, will promote a few ideals of mine:

  • being intentional about content we want on our feed
  • breaking boundary between different platforms (which is the spirit of ActivityPub)
  • promoting open platforms: encourage non-profitting creators to make their content accessible on these platforms, and readers to read from them.
  • consuming internet content without data mining, addictive scrolling, and having the choice to smart filter or sort your feed.

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What are your thoughts? Do you agree that this is worthwhile?

Besides blog posts (RSS), lemmy, Mastodon, and other big fsdiverse platforms, what would you want to see on this app?

  • Auster@thebrainbin.org
    10·
    19 hours ago

    To have an aggregation tool that could seamlessly put together such different environments would awesome, but the scope can be a bit too overarching at first. My suggestion, having seen the progress of another aggregation platform (mainly for video/audio), Grayjay, is to proceed slowly at creating integrations, as effort to maintain them is potentially exponential, and then, when you feel comfortable managing the ones you already made, proceed to the next.

    And unrelated, but is RSS truly shrinking? I found out about it some 1~2 years ago, and unless it’s due to me using this type of technology for so little time, but it feels far more are made or keep existing than there are feeds being killed. Worse part for finding the feeds is that often they are hidden in the page’s source code.