Jekyll2024-03-15T12:56:28+00:00/feed.xmlfossilSocial media optimized for youFossil v0.3 Release2024-03-15T00:00:00+00:002024-03-15T00:00:00+00:00/blog/v0.3-releaseFossil is a Mastodon client with an algorithm for displaying posts according to their content. It’s an algorithm, but it’s not your typical social media algorithm. Engagement (likes, boosts, views) doesn’t factor in at all. Only the content of the post itself is used. Fossil digs through your timeline and finds the posts you wish you saw before.

Website & App

The main focus of this release was fossil as a service. If you elect to go this route, you can pay $4/month and have an always-available web app. This addresses issues around fossil being a little tricky to setup, as well as being able to easily access from a phone (e.g. if the server is running on a laptop).

Improvements

Lots of bugfixes & improvements.

  • New look & feel. Re-wrote the header part of the website, now with a real SVG hamburger menu instead of a literal hamburger 🍔 emoji. Also, a new SVG logo and new display for settings pages.
  • Lots of new hooks for plugins
  • Local stability improvement — Store cache in ~/.cache instead of a temp directory. Some operating systems periodically clear temp files, which put the server into an invalid state until the server was restarted. Meaning that you had to periodically restart the server to keep it functioning. That’s fixed now.
  • Resolve issue #6: Publish package on PyPi by @baseely in #22

As always, please let me know about your wishlist features!

Discussion:

]]>Announcing fossil-social.com2024-03-12T00:00:00+00:002024-03-12T00:00:00+00:00/blog/announcementIt shouldn’t take a lot of effort to stay up to date with industry news. You used to be able to read headlines out of a single journal to keep track of what’s happening in your industry. But then a lot of the information moved online into social media networks and it got harder to keep track of trends.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. all have timeline algorithms that decide what you see and when. These are optimized for keeping you glued to the app. The longer they keep you doomscroolling, the more ad revenue they’ll get.

Today we’re launching Fossil as a service. Fossil is also a timeline algorithm (currently available only for Mastodon), but instead optimizes for your time by highlighting interesting content and letting you ignore everything else. It does that by grouping similar posts together:

image of fossil

Each group is automatically curated by AI. Posts that are about similar things are grouped together and labelled. You can easily understand the general composition of your timeline over the last day, and skip over entire categories.

Why a service?

Fossil is a free open source project. However, it’s a little tricky to setup. A lot of the people who were most interested in using it were the least likely to be able to set it up, whether that be due to lack of time or skills. After all, the people most interested in saving time are often the ones who don’t have extra time to experiment.

Today, fossil is available as a paid service. Subscriptions are either $4/month or $42/year. A subscription gets you:

  • Seamless setup
  • Web app accessible in your browser from anywhere
  • Maintenance and automatic updates to the latest version

Go There Now

Of course, you can also use the open source version of fossil.

Why Mastodon?

Mastodon is an open source social network, which makes it very easy to build on. Many of the other social networks have been closing down access to their API lately, which makes development more difficult.

Mastodon also doesn’t have a timeline algorithm, so adding a new innovative algorithm is seamless and clean. For example, in Twitter/X, it’s difficult to read your entire timeline and be sure you’ve found all posts, because their own algorithm is limiting the content available.

Fossil might support other social networks in the future. Tell us which ones you’re interested in.

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