What Is Minifeed and How Can It Help You?

YOU want to control your social media feed. You want to own your follower lists. You don’t want to have to please the poor, pitiful moderators at some giant, cynical Silicon Valley behemoth. Just like on your blog, nobody should be able to shut you up—though, to be sure, they can shut you out of their own feed. In fact, if you leave Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever, you’d like to be take along your content and your followers and still have them, with just as much impact as they were having before. How could we make that possible?

Well, why not use the same open network that connects our blogs together—RSS—to connect our social media? That was the thought I had last January, when I posted “We Want to Pay for a Good, Functioning WordPress Microposting Plugin.”

The Knowledge Standards Foundation took on the project, and the first example microblog—or, as we call it, “minifeed”—was StartThis:

The new Minifeed theme turns a WordPress blog into a social media feed. StartThis happens to run on my own NAS sitting in a box at home and backed up offsite. It’s pretty cool to be able to control my own social media feed literally from the comfort of my own home. There are over a dozen other Minifeed installs, including one for the Minifeed project itself. You’re going to see a lot more popping up when we finish version 2. When v2 is ready, we’ll make it fully open source (both libre and gratis). It might just change the world…for the better. We’ll take back what’s ours.

v2: General Requirements

Just as I posted the requirements for Minifeed v1 on this blog, I’m going to post the requirements for v2 here too.

In the following, “mini” is short for “Minifeed”.

The first step of v2 is to create a social media reader. This is a big enough job that it might occupy all of v2, but we do want to go further to support cross-mini (or inter-mini) conversations as well as a notification feed. We will build the reader first, anyway. The basic requirements can be briefly listed:

• Follow and unfollow an RSS feed.
• Display only my (i.e., this mini install’s) posts—as at present.
• Feed reader: display my feed with posts from followed feeds (i.e., from other mini installs) intermixed with mine.
• If this is different from the foregoing, which it might not be: display other RSS feeds formatted as minis.
• Add inter-mini discussion threading.
• Support account mention features.
• Display mentions in notification feed.

Assorted feature requests associated with the above:

• The format for a mini account mention should be as in the Fediverse: @[email protected] my Twitter address is @[email protected], while my StartThis address is @[email protected], and my mini address is @[email protected].
• If I type a well-formed mini address, the software should attempt to find the associated RSS feed and account information. It should pop up the account information in a box, as Twitter does at present. I should be able to follow and unfollow the account from that interface.
• I should also be able to follow a feed simply by pasting it into a form (i.e., this is what you have already started developing).
• If I type @id with no domain, the software should attempt to identify that person and complete (shown on mouseover) the address if it is unique. If it is not unique, I should be forced to type the whole address.

I will continue to work on this post over the next few days to weeks, so let me know if you have any special (related) requests or ideas.