Build for the open web, not X: manton.org
@manton I sometimes think about my desire to follow people where they are, including on X. Is there a middle ground here? I mean, having an X account but never posting anything, just to follow other cool people? I feel conflicted about this all the time.
@numericcitizen I feel conflicted too. My current approach is not to follow anyone on X directly, but instead to use X lists and daily summaries of tech people there. OpenAI sends me a morning bullet list of what employees at the big AI labs are posting about.
@manton I don’t mean to keep beating the dead horse but it’s so much easier with your own custom solution using Claude. Elon gets no engagement from me and I still get the content I want. Here’s what Claude built in 2 minutes:
Your daily digest is live at **********workers.dev/daily. Bookmark it or add it to your Home Screen. If you open x.com’s home page in Safari, the redirect sends you there too.
What it does:
• It watches 57 tech and AI accounts: the AI labs and their leaders, researchers like Karpathy and LeCun, builders like Simon Willison and swyx, and the Apple and tech crowd. The list is in src/accounts.js for you to edit.
• Every 10 minutes it checks a few of those accounts, so each one gets checked about once an hour. It keeps their original posts and skips reposts and routine replies.
• It ranks posts by engagement relative to the account's size, so a smaller researcher's post that takes off can beat a routine post from Sundar Pichai. No account gets more than 3 spots.
• It shows the top 20 posts. Long posts are cut to 6 lines, and "Open with replies →" opens the full post with its replies.
• On quiet days it adds an "Earlier · last 3 days" section. Today is a good example: it's Saturday, and the labs haven't posted in two days.
I tested it on the live site: 56 of the 57 accounts came back, and the page shows 20 posts. Today’s top post is a long Karpathy post, which shows up nicely shortened on a phone screen. I fixed two things I found while testing: walls of text in the list, and empty boxes for some posts that quote another quoted post.
Limits:
• It only sees accounts on your list. Without a login there's no search or trending, so a great post from someone not on the list won't show up. If you notice someone worth adding, tell me or edit the list.
• It depends on FxTwitter, which fails about half the time on the first try. The digest retries, so occasionally an account just gets picked up on the next round.
Everything runs on Cloudflare’s free plan. The project is saved in ~/Developer/x-viewer, now in its own git repository. Next I could add a morning push notification with the top 3 posts, or tune the account list toward whatever you find yourself reading most.
@manton I don’t understand the conflict, at least not anymore. Have an account and follow people. Honestly what is the big deal? Circumstances change. Thoughts on things change. Are you going to be on your death bed saying “I’m so glad I held my ground and stayed off X”? To answer the question asked previously there is a huge middle ground. Create an account. Follow people (directly…I don’t understand why lists are somehow better but whatever). Don’t pay for a checkmark. Honestly what is wrong with this? Because Musk is an asshole? He’s going to be one anyhow and people are still going to be there. If it’s important to you then go for it.
@jasonkratz It’s part of my job to overthink this. 🙂 For everyone else, I do think there can be a middle ground. In fact, POSSE is exactly that kind of compromise.
@manton Here’s my very important opinion (ha ha). You just have to do what you are comfortable with. Your values. Not mine, not Adam Dickhead’s, not Elons, not Jason’s, just yours. We all have to live in the world and the economy that we are in. Nearly every aspect of our economy is tied to horrible things in one way or another, but here we are, just trying to do the best we can.
