Following People on Hypothes.is

I get a LOT of value out of using Hypothes.is, but one of my favorite parts is having the RSS feeds of about a dozen interesting peoples’ H feeds piped into my reader. I get not only interesting things to read, but highlights and annotations of the best of it all.

The general format for feeds to subscribe to is https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=XYZ.  As an example my personal feed is at https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich. Some of my other favorites are judell, actualham, nateangell, mpelzel, mrkrndvs, jgmac1106, and jeremydean.

(By the way, you can do a similar thing for tag topics like: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?tag=OER.)

I wish that the system had some more social features to make discovery and following of friends and colleagues easier, but doing it the hard way sort of makes it that much more valuable.

Who are you following there? Which other interesting Hypothes.is users should I be following? Do let me know.

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

36 thoughts on “Following People on Hypothes.is”

  1. I get a LOT of value out of using Hypothes.is, but one of my favorite parts is having the RSS feeds of about a dozen interesting peoples’ H feeds piped into my reader. I get not only interesting things to read, but highlights and annotations of the best of it all.
    The general format for feeds to subscribe to is https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=XYZ.  As an example my personal feed is at https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich. Some of my other favorites are judell, actualham, nateangell, mpelzel, mrkrndvs, jgmac1106, and jeremydean.
    (By the way, you can do a similar thing for tag topics like: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?tag=OER.)
    I wish that the system had some more social features to make discovery and following of friends and colleagues easier, but doing it the hard way sort of makes it that much more valuable.
    Who are you following there? Which other interesting Hypothes.is users should I be following? Do let me know.

    Syndicated copies:

  2. I get a LOT of value out of using Hypothes.is, but one of my favorite parts is having the RSS feeds of about a dozen interesting peoples’ H feeds piped into my reader. I get not only interesting things to read, but highlights and annotations of the best of it all.
    The general format for feeds to subscribe to is https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=XYZ.  As an example my personal feed is at https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich. Some of my other favorites are judell, actualham, nateangell, mpelzel, mrkrndvs, jgmac1106, and jeremydean.
    (By the way, you can do a similar thing for tag topics like: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?tag=OER.)
    I wish that the system had some more social features to make discovery and following of friends and colleagues easier, but doing it the hard way sort of makes it that much more valuable.
    Who are you following there? Which other interesting Hypothes.is users should I be following? Do let me know.

    Syndicated copies:

  3. The other day, Chris Aldrich brought up an interesting point in decentralised systems: How to discover each other?I have some ideas on this (and likely write some code in the future to explore their feasibility).The easiest one would be: manually.I believe, since the very beginning, bloggers curated blogrolls to point to blogs they follow. This way you can build a social graph with a certain degree of confidence.Personally I would combine that with some kind of trust. How favorable is it to follow an other blogger?You could look at the links she gets. Ideally over time, so you could handle hypes or similiar.Recently I discovered FoaF. From what I understood it is a file you put on the root on your server and point to via <link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="/foaf.rdf" />.The structure lookslike this:<rdf:RDF
    xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
    xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
    xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
    xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/">
    <foaf:PersonalProfileDocument rdf:about="">
    <foaf:maker rdf:resource="#me"/>
    <foaf:primaryTopic rdf:resource="#me"/>
    <admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic"/>
    <admin:errorReportsTo rdf:resource="mailto:leigh@ldodds.com"/>
    </foaf:PersonalProfileDocument>
    <foaf:Person rdf:ID="me">
    <foaf:name>Full name</foaf:name>
    <foaf:givenname>First name</foaf:givenname>
    <foaf:family_name>Family name</foaf:family_name>
    <foaf:nick>Nickname</foaf:nick>
    <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>obfuscated mail address</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
    <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="FQDN"/>
    <foaf:depiction rdf:resource="FQDN with path"/>
    </foaf:Person>
    </rdf:RDF>
    This code was generated using FOAF-a-matic.You could list your contacts there, too. I haven’t decided on whether I want this, though. My concerns are about privacy and respect:What does it tell about them and me if they show up there? Could people feel offended if they don’t make it on this list? Since you have to pick a predicate to describe the relationship, which one is the most appropiate?Another approach I discovered is called XFN. It is also XML-based.By using XML you express the semantics (like “A follows B”) in a machine readable way.This could be used by programs tohelp you discover more people.What I find more challenging is to parse podcasts for interesting people. This requires manual work from what I can say right now.

  4. Does hypothesis have a people follow feature? For now I’m bookmarking your profile. Looking through your notes, it’s helpful to see the highlight/note count per article (to find the more engaging articles)



  5. No follow feature beyond RSS/ATOM feeds. Old school methods like rganically stumbling on other users or searching tags and the public timeline are the only methods I’m aware of for discovering people.

  6. This is a terrific post for those of us, like myself, who have used Hypothes.is but who aren’t as familiar with the RSS-related features.  I have a related question that may be better asked elsewhere but here goes:  Are you using a Microsub server to read these RSS/Atom streams from Hypothes.is?  If so, which one?  The Microsub server I use, Aperture, does not seem to recognize the RSS/Atom streams.

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