On: Building the ‘Everything Account’ for the Social Web
Since I’ve been involved in the Social Web, I’ve been fascinated in enabling an ‘everything account’ that serves as your single identity as you build your home on the web.
Your Home on the Internet
I've been captivated by the idea of a "home on the internet" for as long as I've been building online. This concept drew me to both Notion and Arc—tools that let you craft a truly personal experience on the web. Arc (and now Dia) provides a space to explore the internet, while Notion serves as a place to collect and organize what you discover.
A Single Social Identity
Another piece of this puzzle that has intrigued me since discovering the Social Web is the concept of an "everything account"—a single, unified identity that works across all forms of social media. These days we have to manage tons of social accounts across tons of platforms, including various different social graphs, and multiple identities.
Where I Started
I’ve been involved in this space for a while, thinking about new ways to harness the power of the social web, starting out as a writer for the AllThingsTech Blog as well as working on a few internal projects with the team that built Mammoth, a popular, but now defunct Mastodon client.
While we didn’t quite have the runway to bring any of that to light, it’s still a mindset I bring to my own apps now—which brings me to FediReader.
FediReader: What I’m Doing Now
FediReader is a highly-opinionated Mastodon client designed to morph your social media experience into one that’s more conducive to reading the news. You have your same social graph, your same identity, your same credentials as your Mastodon account (because it is your Mastodon account), but your experience changes completely.
On FediReader, your feed displays only links, filtering out the noise of text posts, images, opinions, and chaos. The other information isn’t gone, it’s just hidden. Tapping into any of the links will show you the poster’s commentary as well as all of the conversation around the article.
This approach enables you to experience your same social media account in a completely new way—taking out the extra step of having comment sections on every site and accounts everywhere—letting you just focus on consuming the media you follow.
Changing How We Think About the Client-Side
The common assumption is that social web clients must utilize every API feature to be viable, but this isn't true. By decoupling platforms and clients from the audience, the Social Web enables developers to selectively use API features and build specialized experiences. The underlying data remains accessible—it's simply presented differently.
This paradigm shift moves us beyond apps that differ only in UI to a diverse ecosystem of purpose-built clients. Users can maintain a single identity while accessing experiences similar to TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter—each optimized for different content types like photo sharing or short-form video, rather than generic content feeds.
Where We Go From Here
Ultimately, platforms like Mastodon and the greater Social Web have a long way to go before they can become commonplace in the social media space, but without people out there bringing their ideas to life, that can never happen. If you have an idea: build it. If you don’t have the means to build it, then share it. The only way this all works is by building, and building together.