Behemoth

11/12/2022 9:01 am | : 4 mins. | Share to:

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
Twitter
Email
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.