Fever°

» see feedafever.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i could have run this myself, which is the part that stays with me. Fever was not a website you signed up for, it was a program you dropped onto your own server, a bit of PHP and a database, and then it was yours. i had the machine and the know-how to do exactly that. honestly i just never did. reading feeds was never enough of a ritual for me to go and build it a house.

it came from Shaun Inman in 2009, the developer who had already made Mint, the little self-hosted analytics tool people ran instead of handing their traffic to Google. Fever cost thirty dollars, once, and that was the whole business, no subscription and nobody's ad money in it. you fed it two kinds of feeds. the must-reads it called Kindling, the wider pile it called Sparks, and when enough of your Sparks pointed at the same link that link turned Hot and rose to the top of the list, sorted by a little temperature reading. the degree sign in the name was the joke and the whole idea at the same time.

for a few years it sat there as a clever thing anglophone web people talked about, and then the summer of 2013 came and Google killed Reader. suddenly a lotta people needed somewhere to keep their feeds, and Fever was right there, already built and already paid for, waiting on the shelf. i watched that scramble from a distance. by then i read what i read through other windows, and paying to run my own reader felt like effort i was not going to spend.

~ the record ~

~ the price was the point ~

the thing worth remembering about Fever is the shape of the deal. you paid Inman once and then you owned a copy that ran on your hardware and answered to nobody. for some reason that model barely exists anymore. the readers that came after mostly asked for a few dollars every month to hold your feeds on their servers, which is a fine arrangement right up until the month the developer decides to stop. Fever could not be switched off from the outside, because there was no outside. the only person who could end your copy was you.

~ what got buried with it ~

Inman stopped selling and supporting Fever on christmas eve 2016, alongside Mint, and said plainly that he had moved on to other work. the strange mercy of self-hosted software is that nothing actually died that day. every paid copy kept running exactly as before, and someone put a backup of the code up on GitHub to keep it going for the stubborn. what really got buried was the idea itself, that a person might want to own the machinery of their own reading instead of renting a seat in somebody else's. RSS thinned out anyway, the way it always seemed to. Fever just proved, for a while, that the other way was possible.

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