Reading together, unsupervised

I made a thing called feederss. It sits next my self-hosted RSS reader, miniflux, reads its database, and publishes a small static page showing who subscribes to what, which categories they’ve configured, and what articles they’ve starred (a modified version of mine is here (I’ve removed a few users)). The site also includes a JSON blob I’m using to populate the lists of recent feeds I’ve subscribed to and articles I’ve liked on my about page.

I came up with the idea while taking “Solidarity Infrastructures” at School for Poetic Computation a couple years back. In the class we were challenged to imagine online communities outside the hegemonic grasp of algorithmic curation and surveillance capitalism. Fortunately you don’t have too look too far back to understand that another internet is possible. Many of us remember a time before social media and AI summarizations when RSS feeds and free tools like Google Reader allowed you explore the many weird and wonderful corners of the web. When I found Miniflux, its simple design reminded me of this era and I was excited to share it with others. I now host an instance for a few friends on a raspberry pi in my living room and Feederss helps us keep tabs on what everyone else is reading.

If you want to try it out, there are instructions on Gitlab.