The most underrated Reddit feature is the ability to mark an account as a “friend”. There’s no approval or notification or anything. You just hit a button and their username will light up any time you come across one of their posts or comments:
Recognizing users is the difference between attending a party where you don’t know anyone and bumping your friends in a crowd. It goes a long way to making a site feel like a community, not just a bunch of people talking at each other.
It’s a simple feature and I’m always surprised other online communities like Lobsters and Tildes haven’t cribbed it. And, with the recent announcement that Tildes was officially in maintenance mode, it was time to implement this myself. In a world that feels increasingly inauthentic, making human connections online is feels more important than ever.
User styles to the rescue!
There’s a class of browser extension that let you apply custom CSS to any website (originating with Stylish, but there are lots of options today; I prefer Stylus). If we wrote styles that targeted links to the profile of any user we wanted to follow, then we could highlight them everywhere they appear on each site.
So, I made a tool for exactly that! It’s called rolodex. It’s a little CLI tha reads a toml file full of usernames:
# tildes.tomlusers = [ { username = "a-favorite-user" }, # ...]and generates all the CSS needed to highlight when that user authors something:
/* THIS IS A GENERATED FILE *//* Any manual changes will be overwritten */
.comment-header > a.link-user[href$="/a-favorite-user"],.topic-info-source > a.link-user[href$="/a-favorite-user"],.topic-full-byline > a.link-user[href$="/a-favorite-user"] { color: #ff4500;}Once you paste the file into Stylus, that user is highlighted as you browse:
Right now, it works with Tildes and Lobsters, but I’ll likely add HN support as well.
Build your own
This project started as a way to track these users lists for myself, but I realized pretty early that I wanted to separate my personal user list from the code responsible for processing it. To that end, I’ve also got a template repo with starter toml files and a a little wrapper script to install the CLI, run the build, & copy the results: xavdid/rolodex-template
We haven’t won yet
While slightly cumbersome process is better than than nothing, it does have some drawbacks:
- changing highlighted users means editing a local file, running a script, and uploading the result. That’s cumbersome at best and many users won’t bother at all
- there are limited syncing options
- mobile support isn’t great
- reddit builds you a feed for all the pots / comments by users you follow. That doesn’t happen with pure CSS
Nothing beats a native implementation, so if you’re building / maintaining a social network, please consider adding following as a feature!