fraidycat

Here’s a video essay about “following people from afar on the Internet” called Fraidycat, which also happens to be the name of a desktop app and browser extension for following hundreds of people on whatever platform they’re on. If you like an artist on Youtube for example, or a writer and their blog, then Fraidycat will show you a list of all the recent things that they’ve made. It’s designed not to overwhelm you with an endless feed of noise, which the developer and creator of Fraidycat—Kicks Condor (!)—criticizes when he asks this question:

Do you want to trust that these systems [like Facebook or Twitter] will get your message out? Do you trust that they’ll know what’s valuable?

Recently I’ve found that Twitter is a bad medium for following the people I adore on the web and so I’ve returned to RSS. It feels so much more...sustainable. It feels healthy, too.