Howdy! I think that algorithmic feeds that are designed to keep you scrolling are pretty harmful, but RSS, which is often touted as the healthier alternative, creates its own problems by treating incoming items as if they’re to do items that must be read or dismissed. I want to design an app that can show things that are ephemeral/urgent as well as save evergreen items to be read later, and I think solid is a good framework to use for data ownership and allowing this project to only focus on the dashboard while letting people choose e.g. what RSS reader or read-later service to use.
I like fraidycat, which is similar but hasn’t been updated in awhile and doesn’t handle the evergreen content well, which is important for feeds/people who post rare but high effort/quality posts.
So my vision for the app would be a dashboard like home assistant, where the user can specify cards that would display data like “which twitch streamers that I follow are streaming” or “show recent items from feeds I follow tagged ‘tech‘“ or even “show discord channels I follow where there’s an ongoing discussion". The sources should be varied like that, and ideally have some mechanism to turn any data the app has read permission on into a card. In theory a user could also have multiple dashboards, perhaps one for evergreen content, and a card could specify like a url to open the items in, so it could be read in your read it later service (or a twitch privacy frontend) or w/e.
But you’ll notice the things that I’d want to show here are basically all notifications about activity happening elsewhere on the internet. And if I load up the app and it suddenly has to fetch data from a hundred different sources, it can take awhile for it to actually build the UI to display to the user. So I’d really like for the data to be updated by some background service(s) and written to the pod. I noticed there is an old rss reader for solid, but it looked like it just fetches items locally via a cors proxy. I was wondering if there’s any advice or feedback on how this “ought” to look like. Honestly I’m considering just forking Miniflux so instead of a DB for accounts and feeds and stuff, it just stores an access token to read the list of feeds (and their settings) and write the list of entries, and logging in it just shows buttons to save or delete that token from the list. And I guess do something similar for any other source like twitch.