Eating your own dog food or "dogfooding" is the practice of using one's own products or services.

Eating your own dog food | Wikipedia

This is a known idiom within the software world, and the idea is that by using your own products, you'll get a better feel for what customers will experience. Potentially even fixing things before it becomes an actual bug.

What is raccoonfooding?

Instead of using your own products and services, you intend to use your friends creations.

Where friends is a broad term, but basically means that you use software made by people instead of big corporations. They can be your actual friends, they can be your #IndieWeb friends or your favourite queer tech kitten collective.

Why raccoon? Well, have you ever seen those videos where they come onto peoples porches and eat cat food from bowls, while the cats stand around in bewilderment. That's why.

🦝

Why raccoonfooding?

In essence still for the same reasons, but where you help your friends by discovering things; user experience, bugs, unexpected behaviour.

But it's also very nice if you're on the other side, and people use your software that you've worked hard on. It's a bit of spreading appreciation. ✨

Are there downsides? Yes, potentially. There's more than likely not a big team behind it, it might not always be up, and it takes a lot of effort to keep offering something, so one day they might announce the end of the project.

But this is the charm of raccoonfooding, and means you can find another friend who might offer something similar.

The things I'm raccoonfooding right now

I recently started using 🍡 Mochi by Meadow Cafe, a simple privacy-friendly analytics tool. It's right now running next to my Google Analytics, which nobody in my spheres is a big fan of that, and for good reasons.

However, the reason for this raccoonfooding concept, came when I looked at their 💌 Guestbooks offering. If you're a developer, like me, one of the relatively easiest and earliest things you make, in many tutorials alike, is a guestbook system.

That's when the idea arose that instead of making that myself, I should just use theirs. Dogfooding in a sense, but different.. raccoonfooding.

When thinking about this blogpost, I also realized that I was already using something. My webmentions are by webmention.io a project by Aaron Parecki, one of the founding fathers of the IndieWeb.

Next on the drawing board is something with xmit.co by Pierre Carrier. I'm not sure yet what, because it's static hosting and it will live on a separate domain, but it can be some kind of "art installation" or side-project.