Behemoth
A few weeks ago, I began thinking about a tool that integrated all my various online feeds. At the time I was thinking about integrating:
- RSS
- Podcasts
- Reminders / Notifications
I've abandoned this idea for primarily two reasons.
- Writing my own RSS reader would be a big task. Thus the project's codename 'Behemoth.' Dave Winer's concept of RSS is great, but the realities of it is that there are a LOT of corner cases and things to take care of, etc. I read a blog entry about it a few months ago that cemented how much I was going to be facing and that really turned me off the idea.
- Twitter was going to absolutely dominate the feed. My Twitter account followed hundreds of people and it was really going to be a problem for this structure.
The first remains a massive project and undertaking. The second though has changed. I've been stepping back from Twitter. I'm not off it, but I am using it far less. And I think that the Fediverse would actually be a better usage here. The underlying nature and 'inefficiency' of it, the "content warnings" which are really subject lines, etc. This could really prove to be a better integration aspect.
Along with this idea, I am reminded of my custom Twitter client from back around 2007. I can't remember what I called it, but the defining feature I had come up with was that I hid any post a user made after their three most recent ones.
Back then we were pre-threads, and we were dealing with people going on massive tweet storms about topics. I got frustrated when they dominated my feed. So I decided to collapse any of these extra posts. You knew they were there, but it didn't fill your feed. I could see something similar here.
Ideally, another aspect of the Behemoth RSS portion would be combining RSS posts about similar topics. I subscribe to a number of feeds which overlap and so I can get a half-dozen entries on a news item. Having a system which groups based on topic and keywords would be a huge benefit.
So I guess saying I abandoned this idea isn't true. It continues to sit in the back of my mind as something I'm thinking about. But still, no immediate plans to work on it.