Fraidycat

Follow from afar.

Fraidycat is a new type of single-page “reader” – a dashboard for monitoring social media accounts, discussion websites and blogs. Rather than showing you a massive inbox of new posts to sort through, you see a list of recently active individuals. The page updates as new posts are discovered.

Fraidycat also focuses on “importance” – each account or website that you follow can be assigned a priority, whether you want to keep up in “Real-time” or if you “Rarely” want updates. In this way, you can track important “Real-time” follows on the front page, while lower priority items are hidden away.

Other features are:
– Sync. If you are logged in to Chrome, your follows will be synced between any Chrome browsers running the extension.
– Import and export of your saved data to JSON, OPML and HTML files.
– Tags. Follows can be categorized into separate tabs. Even emoji can be used as tags!
– Concise. Rather than filling up your display with large posts, each follow is given two lines of summary. (See our screenshots.)
– Live and pinned posts. If an account is currently ‘live’ or has ‘pinned’ posts, these are shown in that follow’s status line.
– Dark mode. You can alternate between light and dark themes.
– Fraidycat supports most social networks and feed types.

Fraidycat is a whole new concept in tracking creators on the Web. If you don’t quite see how this is different from a classic feed reader, check out our video above to see the tool in action.

“I did not expect how immediately and wholeheartedly I would appreciate and enjoy [Fraidycat] once I began to use it.” – Jason McIntosh

“I am enjoying the browser extension called Fraidycat, which presents a lovely, anarchic opportunity: follow all the people you like, no matter what platform they’re using, without having accounts on those platforms. Basically, it’s an ‘RSS… or whatever’ reader.” – Robin Sloan

“It’s really neat, and I’m already finding it a much more deliberate and less distracting way of surfing the modern web that doesn’t just involve me mindlessly refreshing social feeds and closing and opening various browser tabs like a rat in a maze.” – Nick Statt, The Verge