social reader

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A social reader is a modern interactive reader that allows you to directly respond to posts (with a like, comment, etc) right there inline with posts as you read them (as people do in social media), in contrast to legacy feed readers which were one-way read-only experiences and provided no mechanisms to interact with or respond to posts.

Why

Watch the Social Readers keynote by Aaron Parecki
- ▶️10:51s

Introduction

Social readers provide the interactivity everyone now expects from social media, yet built with the open standards Microsub and Micropub!

📃 Read Aaron Parecki's An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet for an introduction
🆕 Sign-into Aperture (https://aperture.p3k.io/) and try one of these social readers!

IndiePass

Eddie Hinkle and Kristof De Jaeger are working on IndiePass, which is a set of native iOS, Android and desktop reader apps. It is based on Microsub and Micropub. It allows a user to login using IndieAuth, and if a Microsub endpoint is found on the user's primary identity site, a reader interface is shown when the app is opened. It includes the following features:

See a list of channels
Preview all posts in a channel, with the option to send a reply via Micropub or view the original post at the permalink.

Monocle

Monocle is a web-based reader (desktop and mobile, see above) that is a generic Microsub client and can be used with any Microsub server, written by Aaron Parecki.

Together Project

Grant Richmond and Jonathan LaCour are working on the Together project, which is an open source reader based upon Microsub and Micropub. Together attempts to provide an integrated experience that "brings your IndieWeb experience together," including:

Preview and subscribe to websites, arranging them into "channels."
Create interactions including Like, Repost, and Reply, publishing those interactions to your website via Micropub.
Different layouts to view posts as a timeline, gallery, map or classic 2 pane reader.

Here are a few screenshots of Together as of November 20th, 2018:

How to

Get Started Reading

How to get started with a Social Reader:

Sign in to https://aperture.p3k.io/login with your domain
- after you sign in you will see a link tag displayed on your dashboard
Add the <link> tag it generates for you to your web page
- e.g. <link rel="microsub" href="https://aperture.p3k.io/microsub/000">
sign in to an IndieWeb reader!
- https://monocle.p3k.io/ (web, mobile)
- https://alltogethernow.io/ (web, mobile)
- Indigenous (iOS, Android)

Sessions

During the past two years there have been several sessions on Social Readers, please add them!

...
2020 Austin: Social Readers keynote by Aaron Parecki
...

Brainstorming

Ideas for solving information overload

Information overload was a common problem of classic read-only feed readers. People kept subscribing to feeds, then felt increasingly burdended with keeping up or "unbolding" all their feeds, a similar problem of typical email or usenet readers.

Ideas for solving:

Increase focus like Quill chat

The UI of Quill.chat has a lot of interesting features for attempting to increase focus, that social readers could likely benefit from (see screenshots inside): https://web.archive.org/web/20211207151441/https://quill.chat/

Server specific social readers

Server service and software specific social readers (that work with a particular service or with a particular software’s proprietary posting API, but without standard posting API like Micropub support)

2023-01-05 Feedbin now supports posting straight to Mastodon.

Articles and posts about

2024-01-10: Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse.

Why