I like scrolling through social media. It's fun! But, it's easy to get sucked into it and realize you just spent the past hour looking at a whole lot of nothing. I should be getting more out of my online experience, I realized after finding myself in this position one day. Sometimes, I wanted to read insightful articles and watch interesting videos about topics outside of my usual interests, but I didn't know where to start.
The issue isn't necessarily the feed format itself: It's a useful mechanism for delivering content without the user having to make as many decisions about what they're consuming. What I wanted, then, was a non-algorithmic feed that pulled from the non-social side of the internet and showed me more substantial content. I wanted great content that wasn't made for social media to be accessible as though it was. I worked on that idea and it became Unstagram.
It started simply, as a utility using a giant list of keywords to randomly generate a feed, which led to specialized web searches for articles and videos. (Actually, the predecessor to the current feed-based version of this idea was called Read Something, a much simpler and purely article-based tool that I never shared.) It expanded from there to include convenient bookmarks, the ability to save favorite topics for future reference, and a set of dynamic link buttons.
Now, I'll share some additional thoughts on Unstagram's features and settings.
The Feed view shows the standard feed, featuring keywords that feed into web and video searches. If a topic catches your eye, you can press the heart icon to like it and save it for later (more on that in a second). You can also use the share icon to copy a direct link to the topic on Unstagram and share it with a friend.
The Likes view shows topics you have liked. There's also the option to add your own custom topic to your list of likes.
The Links view shows a list of over 100 link buttons. Some are dynamic and link to URLs that automatically reference the current date, whether it's to get up-to-date pages or to look back at milestones from this date in history. Other buttons link to resources that are regularly updated or have a built-in element of randomness. Overall, the link buttons should offer a new experience every day. (I also spun this feature off into its own tool, Daily Buttons.)
You can set buttons as favorites and have them displayed in the Favorites section, or you can hide buttons you'd rather not see. These buttons show up spread throughout the Feed view, too. The buttons are enjoyable on their own, but part of the idea is that by using them, you'll come across topics you'd like to learn more about, which you can do by using Unstagram.
Visible in all views is the search function, which lets you instantly find content about a topic of your choice.
Google (specifically the udm=14 "Web" view) is the default search engine, but there are many others to pick from.
This is where you can tweak what sorts of content you see when pressing the Articles button in the feed. The included sources were selected for their ability to yield interesting articles to read. To only see human-curated results, uncheck everything except "longform sites" and "Reddit." "Longform sites" searches longreads.com, longform.org, and tetw.org, while "Reddit" searches the r/Longreads, r/longform, r/indepthstories, and r/TrueReddit subreddits, all sources that aim to highlight the internet's most interesting writing.
Check the box to only see YouTube videos that are at least 20 minutes long when pressing the Videos button in the feed.
Expanding the topics list from its default 10,000 entries to over 200,000 introduces many more topics to the feed, but it's not a curated selection like the default list is. The expanded list may cause longer load times, and some terms may not yield good content results (particularly from "longform sites" and "Reddit") due to their specific or esoteric nature. The default list should provide a satisfactory experience for most users, but the expanded list is available to try.
This is where you can customize the visual presentation of the topics in the Feed view.
These settings affect which buttons can appear in the Feed view based on your preferences.
Here, you can back up and restore all of your user data. Unstagram does not have any user accounts (all data and preferences are stored locally, on this browser on this device), so this is the best way to keep your settings safe. You can also choose to clear all your data and start over from the default settings.
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