Fraidycat is a fantastic new app for keeping tabs on your favorite internet gems
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/2/25/21153460/fraidycat-app-extension-internet-reader-rss-news-blogs-youtube
Reported today in The Verge.
Fraidycat is a fantastic new app for keeping tabs on your favorite internet gems
Keeping up to speed with the galactic firehouse of daily internet detritus that gets blasted at our eyeballs every minute of every day can be a taxing endeavor. It often involves using RSS readers, Twitter lists, YouTube and Twitch channel notifications, and all-too-frequent email inbox refreshing, among dozens of other methods for staying on top of your favorite internet oddities and sifting through all the junk to find them.
Thankfully, something like Fraidycat now exists.
A free, open source tool released late last year and significantly updated just yesterday, Fraidycat works as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox or as an app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It bundles together all of your favorite internet stuff into one easy-to-read page, much like a super-powered RSS reader. The best part is that it's not algorithmic like the Social Network That Shall Not Be Named.
You just drop a link to a favorite website, label it appropriately, and it pops up on Fraidycat under the tab you want it under and refreshes only as often as you like. The service looks, and feels, like something designed from a bygone internet era that wasn't dominated by unregulated tech conglomerates with monopolistic holds on the attention economy. And that's the point.
"Magazines of the past kept us up to date with hundreds of people - celebrities and powerful names. The thing that excited me about the internet was that I could keep up with a whole lot of unknown but wonderfully interesting people," says creator Kicks Condor in a YouTube video explaining the purpose of Fraidycat. "However, I don't want some giant news feed of everything. Why is it the current obsession to just du