Social Unbundling
Imagine a restaurant that only sold rice. Open 12 hours a day. 7 days a week. Brown, White, Sticky, Fried, Jollof, blended, mashed, or boiled but always rice. Meat, vegtables, sauces, beverages? No just rice.
In the middle of 2023 there seemed to be 5-10 independent “twitter-likes”. we found ourselves, maintaining a presence across 5 different networks and platforms with near identical functionality. Often to stay in touch with the same groups of people, stuck with the same affliction. Worst of all many of these platforms were actually emerging protocols. The applications (interfaces designed for human use) used did not need to cascade these technical constraints, but very few chose the alternative.
Rather than forcing you to 3 different restaurants to get a round meal. Unbundlers aggregate feeds across multiple networks and media forms, presenting them in a way that might be more useful to the human on the other end.
Fraidycat
creates “a personal surveillance network” of people you want to follow. Everything is organized by recency, although you can sort follows into tags and priority. Proudly, a “tool for you to wield.”
Rabbit Trail
I found Fraidycat in the comment section of a blog post. The blog post was from a block in an are.na channel. A channel I’d been unaware of before finding it with multiple connections across the every single are.na channel related to having a healthy and non-obsessive relationship to technology supercluster.
visualized with g02 graph
All quite funny because, of course, the creator of Fraidycat also has an esoteric blog with links back to are.na, quotebacks, and beaker browser. All my rabbits seem to live in the same hole.
Yakread
It’s initial introduction had me jumping with excitement. Though it has since been (re)introduced with a stronger focus on newsletters. Maybe he lost The Path or perhaps there is something slightly broken along that road I do not yet see.
Readkit
An RSS reader for all your Apple devices. It comes with a built-in support for feed subscriptions (I am not familiar with RSS lingo) but will also act as a client to 16 other services—how is the RSS world so large anyways? This list notably includes Instapaper, Pocket, Pinboard, Wallabag. I’m mentioning these independently because The first two would go in the “read-it-later” category. And the last two are more often described as (maybe social) bookmarking apps. Surprise, surprise the end goal for most people in any of these 17 services is to READ THE LINK. READKit notably not called RSSKit or Pocket Desktop makes it easy.
The general idea I’d like to pitch with these is to simply consider more deeply if the extents of a protocol always match directly with some human action. Interfaces exist to express human actions. They can turn several hundred lines of code into a single button or split a POST request into a multipage form. If we crudely look at apps as “collections of interfaces” we can extend from abstracting lines of code to abstracting protocols. Regular people have been sending marriage proposals on strava routes, using Instagram to track local ice cream flavors, and scraping Facebook Marketplace for price trackers. We have open data now! There is no need to send me a message on Flab or stream it on Poob.