In 2018, I worked on a small proof-of-concept of a “metafeed” of all social media accounts I was interested in following.

The idea was to control my own social media feed: to overrule the algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement and ad revenue, to centralize their content, and tune them to my own interests.

However, since most corporate social media platforms didn’t have APIs that allowed accessing my own feed (even then), I had to take a different approach: to create my own index of account/profile page URLs that I could control.

How it worked

• I would assign a desired frequency to each account, for example; “Show me acount A at most every 7 days”.
• The index would show the account as a link card. That card registered link clicks, and marked these accounts as visited. Once they were visited, they became hidden, until for example the specified 7 days had passed.

These “Frequency” settings and “Last visit” statistics would be combined into a sorting order. Accounts that hadn’t been visited for a long time, even though it was my intention to visit them regularly, would appear on top.

There was also a way to filter accounts by category, to find categories of updates more intentionally. For example: you might be following several accounts of companies or organizations, to learn about new product updates. But when you’re sitting down at night to catch up with the life events of your friends, you want to avoid seeing those updates.

I built a prototype with this logic using an Airtable database and Vue.js.

Legacy

I only used the prototype in the screenshot for a few weeks. However, around 2020, I created a simple Notion database based on the same concepts. I used that one for several months! And I might again.

What’s exciting in 2023, at the time of writing this project description, is that in terms of social media, I’m now mostly active on Readup and Mastodon. Both open platforms that actually do give full access to an API. So maybe some day I’ll work on a v2 of this concept, where closed social media profile links are interleaved with actual posts from open social media.

If you already know of a Mastodon client that allows you to granularly tune your own feed, or a similar project, I’m all ears.