How Tags and Importance Levels Work in Fraidycat

Fraidycat organizes the people you follow with two separate controls: tags decide where a follow appears, and importance decides how often Fraidycat checks it. Tags are free text (emoji work well), and each follow gets one of five importance levels — real-time, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. Only real-time follows stay on the main page; everything else moves off it so you can check those follows on your own schedule.

Tags: grouping follows into views

A tag is just a label you attach to a follow. There's no fixed list — you type whatever text you want, and the source notes that emoji are a common choice because they read quickly at a glance.

The main page has a tabbed bar, and each tab corresponds to a tag. Selecting a tag filters the page down to the follows carrying that label, so tags act as your navigation rather than as a ranking system.

Practical implications:

• A follow can be filed under a tag that matches how you think about that person (a project, a topic, a platform, a mood).
• Because tags are text, you control the vocabulary — there's no imposed taxonomy to learn.
• The tabbed bar is the only mechanism described for switching between groups, so tag design is effectively your page layout.

Importance: controlling check frequency

Every follow also carries an importance value. The five levels are:

The importance level is the setting that tells Fraidycat how often to look for new activity from that individual. It is not a priority score for display — it's a polling cadence.

Why non-real-time follows leave the main page

This is the part that shapes day-to-day use. Follows that aren't set to real-time are moved off the main page, where you can view them periodically on your own.

So the main page is not a feed of everything you follow. It's a list of recently active individuals, and the importance setting determines who qualifies to appear there. The source describes the design intent directly: rather than presenting a massive inbox of new posts to sort through, you see recently active individuals, and no single follow can noisily take over the page because each follow's summary occupies only two lines.

How the two settings interact

Tags and importance are independent:

• Tag answers "which view does this follow belong to?"
• Importance answers "how often should Fraidycat check it, and does it stay on the main page?"

A follow tagged with a work emoji and set to daily will appear under that tag's tab but not on the main page. The same follow set to real-time appears on the main page and still appears under its tag.

Working with a follow

From the main page, each follow shows a two-line summary. You can:

• Expand the line to see a list of recent titles or excerpts from that individual.
• Click the follow's name to read the person on their own network.

If you're logged in to your browser, Fraidycat syncs your follows between your different computers, so tags and importance levels carry across machines rather than being rebuilt per device.

Choosing settings that hold up

A workable starting pattern, given how the two controls behave:

1. Reserve real-time for the small number of people whose activity you genuinely want surfaced without asking.
2. Put everyone else on daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly according to how much you'd mind missing a gap.
3. Use tags to separate contexts — one tag per project, topic, or platform — so the tabbed bar stays scannable.
4. Revisit importance when the main page feels either empty or crowded; moving a follow off real-time is the direct lever for that.

The constraint to keep in mind is that importance is a checking frequency, not a notification preference. Setting a follow to yearly means Fraidycat checks it yearly, so anything you'd want to see within days belongs at daily or real-time.