Fraidycat – Toward Following People Instead of Platforms

Fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/) is a delightful browser extension for following people on the interwebs. It's an easy-to-use yet hackable, FOSS, privacy-respecting, and experimental next-generation feed aggregator and reader. Not every platform offers RSS, so Fraidycat tries to build those bridges for you, scraping and packaging it up for you automagically. It aims to enable you to tailor your own feeds, priorities, and timelines from across the web in your browser.

Instead of being beholden to cycling through endless applications and platforms to follow people: use Fraidycat to simplify, defragment, and take ownership of your window into the lives of others on the web. Fraidycat is afraid of what the web has become (and is becoming), and it's savagely fighting back.

I want to bypass the treadmills and middlemen which aim to commodify my attention span and the pipelines between me and others. I don't want my browser to become just some surveilled thin-client dehumanizingly displaying a walled-garden web engineered by whatever an oligarchy of corporations chooses for me. Fraidycat allows me to more independently use my resources to track and represent people on the web for me. I'm convinced it gives the power of surfing and taking the pulse of the web back to the user.

You own the aggregation process with Fraidycat because it runs in your browser. Political and technological autonomy requires turnkey tooling for users to actively shape the algorithms which pick out what they find salient on their own terms and devices. We have to shape our own filter-bubbles and how we feed ourselves information. Fraidycat is the kind of a lens-crafting tool we need.

Take you, like, two minutes and try you one out: https://fraidyc.at/.