简体中文
EnglishWhat is Fraidycat?
Updated
Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome that lets you follow people across many platforms — Twitter, blogs, YouTube, even a public TiddlyWiki — without a conventional news feed. Instead of an inbox of new posts to sort through, it shows a list of recently active individuals, with each follow taking up about two lines. It suits anyone who wants to keep up with hundreds of people quietly, on whatever platform those people choose, rather than letting one loud feed dominate their attention.
How it differs from a feed reader or social timeline
Most following tools push content at you: a chronological stream, an unread count, an inbox. Fraidycat inverts that. The main page is a list of people, not posts. No single follow can take over the page, because every follow is capped at a short summary.
You can still go deeper when you want to:
- Expand a follow's line to see recent titles or excerpts from that person.
- Click the follow's name to read them on their own network.
The result is a page that stays quiet by default and only gets detailed on demand.
Tags and importance: the two organizing controls
Fraidycat organizes follows with two simple mechanisms.
Tags
Follows are arranged by tag, and tags are plain text — emoji work well if you want visual grouping. A tabbed bar on the main page lets you select a tag and view just that group.
Importance
Each follow has an importance level that sets how often Fraidycat checks it:
| Importance | Behavior |
|---|---|
| real-time | Stays on the main page and is checked frequently |
| daily | Moved off the main page; view periodically on your own |
| weekly | Moved off the main page; view periodically on your own |
| monthly | Moved off the main page; view periodically on your own |
| yearly | Moved off the main page; view periodically on your own |
Only real-time follows remain on the main page. Everything else is checked less often and left for you to visit when you choose — which is what keeps the main view from filling up.
Syncing across computers
If you are logged in to your browser, Fraidycat syncs your follows between your different computers. That means your tag structure and importance settings travel with you rather than being rebuilt per machine.
When Fraidycat fits
Choose it if you follow many people across scattered platforms and want a low-noise overview that respects your attention. It is a poor fit if you want a single chronological stream of everything, unread counts, or an algorithmically ranked timeline — Fraidycat deliberately provides none of those.