If you're interested in recent innovations on this front: (rather than just retreading the same Web as before)
* Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release - and it has some exciting features. Particularly the built-in editor, meaning you can edit, serve and read your pages all from the browser. (Blogging in Beaker is as simple as visiting: hyper://a8e9bd0f4df60ed5246a1b1f53d51a1feaeb1315266f769ac218436f12fda830/. And the posts are stored locally.)
* https://special.fish/ This completely low-tech social network has taken off. The innovation here is that it's all just focused on profile pages - not feeds of random posts.
* There's a growing subculture of public Tiddlywikis (philosopher.life, sphygm.us, etc) - rather than focusing on protocols and APIs, they are much more focused on how to organize and style personal hypertext.
* As for RSS, well, as HN custom insists, I am also commenting to plug my own fraidyc.at. See, you knew it was here.
* There's also a forum on tiny personal link directories that's been forming at https://forum.indieseek.xyz. The idea here is to use Yahoo! or DMOZ style link directories at a smaller scale, to catalog corners of the Web. (Note that this whole comment itself is a kind of small 'directory'. Rather than an algorithm stepping in to show you 'related' stuff, I have.)
Thanks for this post. I checked Fraidycat out and it solves many issues that I consider broken with social medias these days. Your personal website made me incredibly nostalgic and almost depressed, longing back to a simpler time in my life.
Both of your projects will serve as inspiration for myself. Your personal site especially as it feels creative and liberated, things I strive for in my personal life.
Oh don’t be depressed - my messy site took five years to make and you would be disgusted at the guts of it. And besides, there are many many days still in the future - I just flicked through my calendar and couldn’t seem to reach the end - so there is time to unlock more for you. Your site looks good, so I think you are underestimating yourself, which is lying Sami - it’s lying.
Hah thanks man. I do like what I'm currently building for myself as well, but it lacks a certain IDGAF attitude and it's not different in any ways. Plain and vanilla, which is fine for conveying information but there's nothing creative about it.
The indie web movement with self hosting simpler sites, webrings and RSS are a nice blast from the past and I hope that the issues we've seen with Facebook, Medium et al will bring back all the good thing's we've seemingly almost lost. RSS should be mandatory.
I'm not sure I understand the special fish or the Tiddlywikis - what are they? I clicked around, but I don't get it.
Fraidyc.at is very cool though - I remember seeing that a while back and think I'll likely end up using it at some point when I have some time to play with it.
Hi zalberico, I'm h0p3. I can't say I get it either. My wiki is a place to store stuff and to tell myself linked stories. Maybe it is a hypertext castle, a rabbithole, a garden, a mind map, an exobrain, a Zettelkasten, an existential mirror or conduit. Despite significant effort, I'm not sure how to describe it well enough. It's a site I like to see. It's where I do muh thinkin, I tellyawhat.
Hello h0p3, I modeled much of my tiddlywiki (not public, used for life stuff more than a public repo of thoughts) after yours, and greatly enjoy your writing. Just figured you ought to hear that!
Hey dvtrn! That's high praise, thank you. =). I'm glad it's been useful.
It's my pleasure to meet you. I also remember reading your comments here on HN (I enjoy your sense of humor). Feel free to HMU anytime, even just to talk wiki-shop.
I love Fraidycat - it gave me the final push to delete my twitter account I had since 2007: let's me keep following the half-dozen accounts I actually cared about. Thanks for your work!
I just tried downloading the Windows executable. Initially it said it will take 1.5 hours, but then the download just failed. Tried a few more times with the same result. This is ironic on so many levels.
Hey – Installed Fraidycat (FC) and tested with DaringFireball (DF) feed. I see it shows the DF title and links to whatever 3rd party link DF is reporting on.
Title: The Unicorns Fell Into a Ditch
Link: bloomberg article
In this example the title is pretty much meaningless so I need DF's take on the topic before I make a decision to go off and visit Bloomberg. My existing RSS feed provides DF's blog content (text).
So I just wanted to understand whether I'm missing something here, or in fact FC is doing exactly what you designed it to do; title and link to 3rd party page only. Pretty much like how Hacker News (HN) operates?
Prehaps it's just the way I personally navigate. I never click on HN titles to go to 3rd party links. I always hit the comments first. The top comments usually give me a good overview before I decide to vist the 3rd party page.
Probably FC isn't intended for me, but I just wanted to sure I'm not missing something, because I'm genuinely excited to use. Regardless, many thanks for making FC.
P.S. I love the retro look of you personal site and FC's home page.
That's cool - thanks Pixxel! So Fraidycat literally just grabs the title and link from each post in the feed - so it has to do with how DF formats its feed. It appears that the JSON feed works correctly tho: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/json
Also BTW, I joined Fish yesterday. Today I went to login and I couldn't. My password/email was definitely correct. So I tried resetting. When adding a new password the error message kept telling me that my new passwords didn't match.
I used a special character (&) in my password. I removed the ampersand and was able to reset password, and log back in.
Sorry if this isn't the correct channel for bugs (feel free to redirect me).
Hey there, sorry about the trouble. I've pushed a fix. Special characters should now be working in the reset flow now. If you come across any other bugs feel free to email mail@special.fish. Thanks!
Interesting! These sites reminds me of the various scenes that flourished around the nettime mailing list and the net.art movement[1]; and it also reminds me of the Web 2.0 days when microblogging sites such as Jaiku and others where popular.
Any interest in breaking fraidycat out into an app you can self-host and visit via the browser? I'd love to be able to use it from any device via a browser, and have the hosted version be the single source of truth.
> As for RSS, well, as HN custom insists, I am also
> commenting to plug my own fraidyc.at. See, you knew it was
> here.
This is quite a nice implementation and the back story is cool.
I have also been thinking about this for some time, but what I want to achieve is decentralized RSS feeds. Servers go down over time, are blocked or suffer some other issue. I want to be able to help keep alive the content I consume, possibly without the need for centralization.
Ideally the aim would be to maintain backwards compatibility and be as decentralized as possible, but I'm still yet to solve this problem without resulting to just using torrents.
Have a look at the beaker browser suggested in the parent post. It uses the hypercore protocol (new name for the dat protocol), which allows one to build collections of data, update them, and have them mirrored over a DHT, kind of like IPFS does. You can choose to contribute to mirroring some content you like, if you want to :)
Of course, ideally, the websites themselves would publish articles on the hypercore network, and be the source of trust here, but I don't see why you couldn't do it from RSS feeds.
I am not sure whether the data is content-addressed on hypercore? If so, multiple people could archive the same content to make sure it is identical, and still enjoy the benefits of distributed hosting :)
Completely different. Look up privacy or anonymity on beaker's site? Crickets. It's a browser, apparently with all the dangerous bloat (javascript...) with a bolted-on p2p network that apparently does nothing for privacy or censorship resistance.
Freenet is a p2p network with a focus on anonymity and resistance against censorship. It's not a browser, but for freesites it's got protections in place to filter out dangerous active content.
We're focusing on the protocol's capabilities and performance right now. Distributed or non-distributed proxies are on the roadmap, but not the current priority.
We aren't for everyone and the current lack of IP privacy is a good reason not to use Beaker if it concerns you. We're more about software freedom and solving walled gardens, so that's what we chose to solve first.
Beaker came to my mind immediately as well when reading this article :) It sounds so much like the perfect fit for the author.
The new beta has been quite depressing for me, as all my personal apps stopped working due to their complete rewrite of their API. I don't know if I'll ever be willing to start it all over again.
But for anyone who hasn't already played with it, I totally recommend it. It feels like the web we should have had.
Really sorry about breaking your old apps. If you ping me on twitter (@pfrazee) or IRC, I can spend some time helping you convert them over. Most of the same capabilities are there (or on the way) so we'll hopefully just need to update the code.
EDIT: for anybody curious, we had to make breaking changes to the p2p protocol and used that as a chance to bundle a lot of improvements -- mainly with performance and reliability. It sucked to break existing content though.
> EDIT: for anybody curious, we had to make breaking changes to the p2p protocol and used that as a chance to bundle a lot of improvements -- mainly with performance and reliability. It sucked to break existing content though.
What guarantees are in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen again in the future? I really like the project and realize it’s still young and can probably risk piling on breaking changes, but I can’t imagine future upgrade paths will involve contacting one of the project maintainers on Twitter.
> What guarantees are in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen again in the future?
I will say that I'm personally embarrassed that we had to do it. I don't like disappointing people who support our work. There was a post on HN recently about how Unity keeps breaking its platform; I don't want to end up like that.
The other thing I'll say is, there was a year-long gap from the 0.8.x beaker releases to the 1.0, and a lot of that time was connected to the engineering work on the protocol. The top priority was scaling, but we also added tooling the protocol so that if a similar breaking change is needed in the future, we can handle it smoothly.
Beaker looks very interesting indeed! Download it as I write this. Reminds me a little of what I've read about HyperCard. Looking forward to testing it.
Thanks for the heads-up! There are so many links to follow up on here in this thread.
Wow, thanks for this list of things to check out. This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping we'd be talking about and share.
I downloaded and am playing with fraidyc.at and am so far really liking the idea -- the whole idea made more sense after watching your video and then actually testing it. Thanks for making it.
Oh hey! Really honored you took the time. I love that your blog has has had some attention these past few days. You write very thorough articles and I love that you have a somewhat quirky design, Parimal. It’s classic!
* Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release - and it has some exciting features. Particularly the built-in editor, meaning you can edit, serve and read your pages all from the browser. (Blogging in Beaker is as simple as visiting: hyper://a8e9bd0f4df60ed5246a1b1f53d51a1feaeb1315266f769ac218436f12fda830/. And the posts are stored locally.)
* https://special.fish/ This completely low-tech social network has taken off. The innovation here is that it's all just focused on profile pages - not feeds of random posts.
* There's a growing subculture of public Tiddlywikis (philosopher.life, sphygm.us, etc) - rather than focusing on protocols and APIs, they are much more focused on how to organize and style personal hypertext.
* As for RSS, well, as HN custom insists, I am also commenting to plug my own fraidyc.at. See, you knew it was here.
* On a related note, I've also been working on an RSS/Atom extension to handle ephemeral posts: live streams, "stories", pinned posts, etc. https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Exten...
* There's also a forum on tiny personal link directories that's been forming at https://forum.indieseek.xyz. The idea here is to use Yahoo! or DMOZ style link directories at a smaller scale, to catalog corners of the Web. (Note that this whole comment itself is a kind of small 'directory'. Rather than an algorithm stepping in to show you 'related' stuff, I have.)