Feedhouse gets public pages, comments and Webmentions

Feedhouse has always had a quiet social side. You can follow people, share an item with a note, talk about it in the comments, and put together bundles of feeds for others to subscribe to. Until now, all of that stayed with your followers.

This release lets some of it out, but only the parts you choose. Here's what's new.

A public page, if you want one

Turn on Give me a public page under People → Your page, and anyone can open feedhouse.app/u/yourname, signed in or not.

The page starts out empty. It only shows what you mark public, one thing at a time:

• Shares. The share dialog has a new Also show on my public page box. A public share shows the article's title, a link to it and your note. Together they make a link blog.
• Highlights. A highlight can be made public too. Your page then shows the quote, your note and the article it came from, like a commonplace book.
• Bundles. Bundles you've set to Everyone are listed as well.

Your page never shows an article's text, only titles, links, your notes and the passages you highlighted. Nothing from a newsletter can be made public, because an issue was sent to you alone and its links often carry who you are. And turning your page on doesn't make anything public that you shared before.

Follow it from anywhere

Every public page has an RSS feed of its shares at /u/yourname/feed.xml, so people can follow you in any feed reader, not just this one. The page names the feed in its HTML too, so most readers will find it from the page address alone.

People who do use Feedhouse get a Follow button. If they aren't signed in, it takes them through signing in or signing up and back to your page.

A name, a face and a link

Under About you you can add a display name, a short bio, your website and an avatar. The avatar loads through Feedhouse's image proxy, so the site hosting it never sees your visitors.

Your website is linked with rel="me", including in the page's HTML. That means Mastodon can verify it: put your Feedhouse page in one of your Mastodon profile's links, put your Mastodon address in Website, and you get the green check.

People to follow

A new account used to start with an empty reader and a few featured bundles. Now it can start with people as well. Admins can feature public pages, and those pages show at the top of People and on an empty reader, next to the featured bundles. Someone picks them. Nothing is ranked by popularity or engagement, and a page that's turned off drops out.

Comments from anyone signed in

Until now, only your followers could comment on your shares. Now anyone signed in to Feedhouse can comment on a public share, straight from your page. Here's who can read what:

• Signed out, visitors see how many comments a share has and a link to sign in, but not the comments themselves. People's comments stay off the open web and out of search engines.
• Comments your followers wrote before you made a share public stay with your followers. Each comment keeps the audience it was written for. Making a share public later doesn't hand those comments to strangers.
• Comments written while a share is public can be read by anyone the thread is open to.