Minifeed

Minifeed is a new aggregator from Rakhim that pulls updates from the small web into a personalized reader. It's a fantastic idea—one I've kicked around before. That said, I think there are a few things about it that 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, that backlog will only grow. Having just one or two people handling submissions will take a lot of work. 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 let users filter by content type if they only want longer posts? Platforms like Bluesky and 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 them out automatically.

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