Minifeed

Minifeed is a new aggregator from Rakhim that pulls updates from the small web into a personalized reader. It’s a cool idea—and one I’ve kind of kicked around before. That said, there are a few things about it that I think could be better and some challenges it might have as it grows.

Minifeed, like other indie web tools, is human-curated. This is awesome in theory but not so much in practice if the goal is to grow. Approving sites manually might work when there’s only a handful coming in each day, but as the service takes off (and I hope it does), that backlog is only going to grow. Having just one or two people handling submissions isn’t going to cut it long-term. Maybe some form of automation could help, letting an AI handle the easy stuff while flagging more complex submissions for human review?

The submission rules also caught my attention, especially #5:

“Must not be purely a ‘micro-blog,’ i.e., must have some content other than tweet-sized status updates or links.”

This feels unnecessarily restrictive. Why not just let users filter by content type if they only want longer posts? Platforms like Mastodon have shown that even short, "micro-blog" updates are important and I think they deserve to be featured too. What’s more confusing is that, while browsing Minifeed, I saw updates that fell into this category, so I’m not sure how it’s being enforced.

Another thing, and this isn’t just a Minifeed problem, is that the indie web has its fair share of “test” posts—stuff like experiments or throwaway updates that don’t really go anywhere or get deleted later. While browsing Minifeed, I came across a few of these. It’d be great if there were some kind of rule discouraging those kinds of posts—or even better, a way for curators to filter it out automatically.

Overall, Minifeed looks like it has potential. I’m definitely going to keep my eye on it. Tools like this, especially if they nail the right features and get good adoption, could really take the indie web to the next level.