I built Hey Homepage for myself, because I wanted a more calm and niche way to experience and participate in the open web. I was done with outrage and mainstream that's so prevalent in the platforms from big tech.

With the custom-built software behind Hey Homepage I can not only publish pages and posts, but I can also keep track of updates of my favorite sites. A lot of existing websites have automatic 'feeds' that are used for these news updates. For example, if you have a Wordpress website I can stay up to date about your posts with my website from Hey Homepage. It's interoperable.

Right now, I use Hey Homepage myself to follow around 800 other websites and their updates. I follow some computer and car news. I follow some 'dev blogs' with weekly or monthly updates. I follow some timelines from people that post shorter but more frequent posts (like Twitter). I even follow some Youtube channels without being exposed to their algorithm.

What I'm missing and would like to see more of, are feeds about hobbies/activities other than computer-related stuff. I might be in a bubble or I'm dealing with early adopters, but the only quality feeds I encounter are from programmers who write about... programming. I put my money where my mouth is and added a microblog/timeline to my website about building a bicycle caravan (see theredpanther.org).

What I also miss are more 'photo feeds'. Every update in a feed can have a picture included, why not make more use of that!? It sparks some live into the dull text-only format. Adding a photo now and then also makes the webview of the a timeline more interesting. Just as Twitter-posts can have a picture attached. I make extensive use of photos on a niche site of mine about beautiful cars. Go check Artomotive.

The technical side of these things isn't new or innovative. And that's the beauty, it's proven technology. No hype, just natural growth. The technology behind 'feeds' (it's called RSS, I call it 'Really Social Sites') is twenty years old now. It's not tainted by surveillance capitalism, commercialism, algorithms, platforms or AI. But to get the most out of it, you have to do some things. Like collecting interesting feeds/websites to follow, clicking to read the whole article, playing the algorithm yourself by curating the stream of content, etc. But if you want to stay sane on a changing internet, it seems the only way.

And that's also the beauty. Just as the internet in the 90's filtered access by having some technical road blocks, consuming an info diet with 'feeds' also acts as a filter for interesting content. By now we know the interesting stuff is not on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever. That's for the mainstream now. I've been there, done that, and I can't care anymore.