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Comment by ipaddr | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping this was the opposite of a creators platform - a social media users platform. Download all social media to one place (stories/posts) where you can view on your own schedule.

Is there anything like that out there?

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Someone just posted this: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/

Same. I was hoping for this. As much as social media frustrates me, the content can be great at times. I want an aggregation tool where I have strict control on the output. Give me the content minus the addictive never ending scroll with inflammatory posts. Basically, I want a benevolent curation of media on my terms.

I want the same. The problem is that this kind of tool is outside the T&C of the platforms, and if they catch you using it, you would probably be banned or suspended. There will be always a small risk of that.

Big upvote for this. I want an "agent" (overused term) to scroll through all the user-hostile feeds and present what I actually want to see in a calm, ad-free, manner.

Tools like instaloader are a start, but screen scraping might be the best bet to avoid detection/banning.

RSS can get you there, lots of clients but you have to teach your friends how to make their own websites and set up a feed

made me think of Pidgin, the chat client that could talk to any chat server

I'm taking the submission as: if you've got an idea, here's some methods to work build something.

I have a few ideas if my own, perhaps yours is something that could be created.

Platforms really don't want you to build that. But depends on what platforms your talking about, open ones like bsky and mastodon could allow for something like that

You can build one in three weeks with Claude. I'm not joking - you'll have energy for side projects you never had before, and you'll finish them.

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