[HN Gopher] Discovering the indieweb with calm tech
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Discovering the indieweb with calm tech
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 203 points
Date : 2025-12-07 03:26 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alexsci.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (alexsci.com)
| philips wrote:
| This is excellent UX for feed discovery. I always found the feed
| subscription thing distracting- usually I am reading blogs to
| solve a problem or research and not collect/socialize. That is
| something I am in the mood for later.
| mvkel wrote:
| It's surprising that it took this long for such a simple
| extension to appear. What a brilliant way to passively crawl
| high-signal content
| DavideNL wrote:
| Source post: https://indieweb.social/@robalex/115675680018007724
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Surely the blog post itself comes before the social post
| linking to the blog post. The blog post is the source.
| DavideNL wrote:
| Obviously;
|
| "Eugene" [1] boosted the post, which is how it gained
| attention i believe. That's what i meant with "source" ;-)
|
| [1] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron
| riffraff wrote:
| ironically, the blog lacks a rel=me link that would make
| streetpass work on it :)
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Oops, added. Thanks :)
| qWoodpecker wrote:
| That is great. I didn't know I needed this.
|
| After browsing for a few minutes I found that it really needs to
| have some kind of filter mechanism. For example, on
| old.reddit.com each post has its individual feed, while on
| blogspot you have both RSS and Atom feed.
| mariusor wrote:
| My experience to a T.
|
| The "calm tech" concept works really well with the fediverse
| identities because it's such a niche concept that at the end of
| a day of browsing you'll get a handful of entries, but for
| something as ubiquitous as RSS you get a ton of useless feeds
| that are just. But I really, really like the basic idea, I'll
| see if I can apply it to the things I'm building. :)
| coldpie wrote:
| Yeah after some refinement, this seems like a really cool tool.
| Needs to work on Firefox for Android :)
| safety1st wrote:
| It's incredible. I don't know the guy and I'm not being paid to
| say this, but I really think Blog Quest is a stroke of genius.
|
| The article totally buries the lead, so for anyone who misses
| it: this is a browser extension which simply keeps track of a
| list of the RSS feeds of websites you've browsed, so that later
| you can subscribe to them if you want to. It was forked from an
| extension which does the same for Mastodon.
|
| It solves a very simple problem, which is that when I'm
| browsing a website I'm usually not thinking about subscribing
| to it, but later on when I'm reading my feeds, I wish I could
| add some more.
|
| Blog Quest does what Mozilla was supposed to do with their
| hundreds of millions of dollars. From the moment that they
| declared their mission was to promote the open Web and
| negotiated an annual nine figure check out of Google. This is
| where the money should have gone: easy UX for people to
| subscribe to websites through an open standard, laying the
| groundwork for a free social graph on top of it one day. If
| they had done it at the right time they might have changed the
| course of history (again?).
|
| Sadly they didn't. For 15 years they gradually buried RSS and
| then one day some random dude just throws a browser extension
| out there better than anything they ever did in the space.
| Extension of the year. Massive kudos to this guy.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Author of Blog Quest here, good point, I'll track that as a
| feature request. I'm open to ideas on how the filtering should
| work. I could roll-up feeds for each domain (hello public
| suffix list), but I don't think that works well for home-dir
| style hosting (example.com/username). Maybe the user can set a
| policy to filter out or roll-up certain domains?
|
| Deduplicating RSS and Atom makes a lot of sense too.
|
| Thanks for trying it out!
| sdoering wrote:
| Yeah - for a lot of people deduplication would probably make
| sense. I have - for example - four feeds on my private page
| (blog posts, quotes, photo-galleries and a roll-up feed
| containing everything). So whenever I post anything, two of
| those feeds get populated. But I wanted to give people the
| option to only subscribe to the categories of content, they
| are interested in.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I've been messing with and collecting stuff like this for many
| years. Some links:
|
| - On building kind, sustainable software:
| https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/kind-software/
|
| - Example projects (toys instead of blogs):
| https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/projects-and-apps-i-built-f...
|
| - Wishlist: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/things-to-support-
| my-own-we...
|
| - List of places to find indie content (something I used for my
| weekly newsletter): https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-
| find-indie-web-co...
|
| Nowadays my current approach is:
|
| 1) meeting folks via Say Hi (unoffice hours)
|
| 2) keeping a separate RSS feed in NetNewsWire called People -
| this feed contains only the people I've met online or in person
|
| EDIT: I almost forgot, but my partner wrote a cool intro to
| Indieweb for less techie folks:
| https://newpublic.substack.com/p/the-handmade-internet-is-ma...
|
| It includes interviews with some of the people you might know
| from here :)
| rapnie wrote:
| Nice! You might add Prezi as inspiration for zooming and
| panning across the live dynamic environments, islands on your
| everything canvas in: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/an-
| everything-canvas/
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Hey, author for Blog Quest here, thanks for the kind words! I
| give a huge thanks to tvler for StreetPass for Mastodon, which
| did the heavy lifting and inspired me.
|
| Please send along any feature requests, I know there are rough
| edges and more eyes will help find them. I'm also trying to
| decide if the RSS feature should be pushed upstream to
| StreetPass, or if the extensions are best staying separate.
| Thanks all :)
| protontypes wrote:
| The best tool for significantly reducing noise across social
| media while remaining connected is the News Feed Eradicator.
| LinkedIn is a particularly important tool for me, as I use this
| social media network a lot for work, but I can't allow myself to
| be distracted by it. With this little tool, I can set exactly how
| many minutes a day I want to spend on the feed without losing the
| ability to contact others directly via LinkedIn.
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/news-feed-eradicato...
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