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nathell 4 days ago [-]
I’ve been perusing Bubbles increasingly often since discovering that my blog is syndicated there, a few weeks ago.
It feels really refreshing compared to doomscrolling of social media, or indeed even to HN. It’s so diverse and humane. The indie blogosphere is coming to life.
Kudos to the author. A great idea, splendidly executed. I hope it grows and doesn’t change much.
flir 4 days ago [-]
Just glanced at the front page - it seems to be very "blog posts about blogging" (4 out of the top 5 posts right now). Is it always like that?
The "My" tab looks like it covers the same ground as a feed reader would. I wonder who the audience is for that feature.
jl6 4 days ago [-]
Is blogging always like that? Always has been.
flir 4 days ago [-]
From memory, there was a long tail of blogs like that way back when, but a core of solid, interesting content. I have an expectation that an aggregator would bubble the interesting stuff up, and the self-referential stuff down. But maybe this is just content the audience finds interesting.
jl6 3 days ago [-]
There is still solid and interesting content, it’s just that the material is so diverse that attention is spread thinly. Meanwhile, blogging is the one thing bloggers definitely have in common, so the attention is more concentrated.
It’s a failing of aggregators that they optimize for attention concentration rather than interestingness. But is there even such a thing, objectively?
flir 2 days ago [-]
> attention concentration rather than interestingness
With sufficiently rich data, I think they're equivalent.
I think collaborative filtering works much better once you have a critical mass of users/data - enough that taste clusters emerge. Otherwise it just defaults to whatever's globally popular. Google Reader managed it quite well. Librarything is fantastic at it (far better than Amazon).
I wrote a simple recommendation engine for musical taste in the early 2k's (pre-last.fm), but it had very little data available to it. The result? It recommended Radiohead to everyone. (Looking back, this was my first exposure to The Bitter Lesson).
woodpanel 3 days ago [-]
> it’s so diverse and humane
Opened the page, first entry: „white supremacist dogwhistle“
One can’t make this much diversity and humaneness up.
Yes, their frontpage overall seems normal and you probably meant well, but that this is their first entry is just hilarious.
finjo 1 days ago [-]
If anti-racism is hilarious to you, then yes please do us both a favor and stay away from bubbles.
ykonstant 3 days ago [-]
Hmmm... very disappointing that when I unchecked "politics" in Filter, that post remained in the list.
Royce-CMR 2 days ago [-]
The post (after reading it) is not political in the today sense. It’s connecting an in vogue concept to toxic thought patterns and notes a correlation in both the patterns and trending association of some influencers to a specific political segment.
The point the author is trying to cover is that a lifestyle and aesthetic the author naturally aligns with actually actively excludes her - and that pattern is seen elsewhere and (author opinion) has wider implications.
I’d argue it’s a fair and not a political statement (there is some text that indicates the preference of the author) but a human realizing and sharing their exclusion from a group and that the exclusion expands into (again, author perspective) defined categories of people. Talking about thoughts and opinions is… what I expect from a blog.
Very cool but I would like to be able to create an account with my mail address instead of using a Mastodon account because I am trying to avoid social media.
solid_fuel 4 days ago [-]
It looks like there's an RSS feed at the bottom. If you don't want to use the social aspects of the site, maybe just use that in an RSS reader?
Hmmz the "briefing" rss feed can't be filtered by "minimum votes", i believe...?
viermalbe 3 days ago [-]
The briefing rss feed contains one entry per day with a link to that days briefing page. The briefing itself cannot be customized, it's the same for everybody.
For the list views you can use the filter menu to filter by min votes or subscribe to any of the min vote rss feeds.
I can't speak to other fediverse software but I tried a few lemmy servers to no avail. My mastodon instance is under maintenance so I guess I'll have to wait until that's done to sign up.
rsolva 4 days ago [-]
I do NOT consider the Fediverse and the myriads of implementations of it to be social media, but rather a social web. More like websites with the abilities to communicate and interact in different and interesting ways.
Social media is dead, and has been for a while. Many use it still, but it is not primarily social. The social part was mainly a ploy to get peoples attention and then badly abusing it in ever more creative and sinister ways.
rirze 3 days ago [-]
To me, social web == social media.
I don't use Facebook but use it for auth when I have no other option.
Even worse, I don't want an external service federating my identity when I can avoid it. We have all heard of people getting locked out in cases where Google decided to ban a user from their platform.
I'm never trusting an external provider again.
rsolva 3 days ago [-]
Exactly! It is so empowering to host my own instance at home and own my own identity online, using GoToSocial.
casey2 3 days ago [-]
The site you are trying to make an account on is social media, the current site you are on (news.ycombinator.com) has more dark patterns than the average fediverse instance.
It's just a protocol
Email uses SMTP to push text from @domainA to @domainB.
The Fediverse uses ActivityPub to push JSON-LD from @domainA to @domainB.
It's also vastly easier to self-host than email.
AbuAssar 4 days ago [-]
I'm curios why you are avoiding social media?
exitnode 4 days ago [-]
Mostly because the "damn this is interesting" to "i don't care what you ate yesterday" ratio is not good enough to spend my time on it. These days I am much more enjoying exploring gopher holes, reading and writing blog posts. For realtime communications, I prefer IRC. For me, social media sits in between chatting and publishing content and is therefore neither fish nor fowl.
ykonstant 3 days ago [-]
> For realtime communications, I prefer IRC.
How on earth do you get people to talk in IRC? Am I missing something? Almost every channel I have joined is dead silent, and any time I tried starting a conversation I felt like I was asking Lebowski for my money.
locknitpicker 3 days ago [-]
> I'm curios why you are avoiding social media?
You make it sound as if that's undesirable.
rsolva 4 days ago [-]
I do NOT consider the Fediverse and the myriads of implementations of it to be social media, but rather a social web. More like websites with the abilities to communicate and interact in different and interesting ways.
Social media is dead, and has been for a while. Many use it still, but it is not primarily social. The social part was mainly a ploy to get peoples attention and then badly abusing it in ever more creative and sinister ways.
EDIT: This comment was meant to be posted to the parent comment!
altairprime 3 days ago [-]
Email the mods and ask them to detach and relocate it.
sdevonoes 4 days ago [-]
Because there’s little good about it
globalnode 4 days ago [-]
Its a scam
Schiendelman 4 days ago [-]
+1 to this. Apple sign-in would be ideal, since it maps to single-identity more cleanly than a social media system.
dredmorbius 4 days ago [-]
Bug.
nozzlegear 3 days ago [-]
?
dredmorbius 3 days ago [-]
Consolidating your online activity to a single ID is a bug.
1. It enables correlation, tracking, and stalking across sites.
2. It makes people vulnerable to being locked out of that single-ID provider.
3. It makes people vulnerable across multiple services to a compromise of that single-ID provider.
4. It risks alleged abuse at any one service relying on the single-ID provider causing problems with other services, or the SIDP itself. Reputation attacks, Joe Jobs, and the like become attack vectors.
5. In the specific case of Apple, the represented population is small enough that sites relying on it would exclude a huge number of people, if there were no other alternatives.
I'm of an age and from a time in which one didn't use one's real name online, with very rare exceptions, and in which compartmentalising activities into different independent services. Service consolidation, where a small set of ogolopolistic actors snap up previously independent companies, and then decide to forcibly integrate those services, is yet another problem. One of the highest-voted HN submissions I've been associated with was my own report of this happening, 13 years ago, on Google+: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731>. (The submission was by @davidgerard, but was based on my own G+ experience.) The original G+ content is archived here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20120118044728/https://plus.goog...>. NB: the discussion on that thread is quite interesting.
Relevance being I've been following this practice for a long time. Well before the G+ post mentioned as well.
The backstory on that post: not only had Google integrated previously independent G+ and YouTube accounts, but it did so based on email address, often linking real-name and pseudonymous accounts. Several people found themselves outed in different, and more significant ways, including revealing personal, social, political, or other aspects with public and professional accounts.
I'd already preempted this to a large extent by acting when I first heard the "Google+ is an identity network" comment by then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt to NPR reporter Andy Carvin in an impromptu and unscheduled interview, in 2011. I deleted the several-weeks-old personally-identifying G+ account, and employed my "dredmorbius" persona to create a new account.
Online identifiers serve multiple purposes. I don't mind having a persistent identity as "dredmorbius" or occasionally "Doc Edward Morbius" (I've deliberately avoided using "Dr." for some time to avoid falsely claiming any unwarranted credentials). But where I don't care to have that association made, I have, or create, other independent aliases.
My general feeling is that ID systems should be at a minimum-viable-level basis, and largely a separate consideration from another often-conflated aspect, reputation.
Schiendelman 3 days ago [-]
1. Not in the case of Apple, since you get a unique key that's only usable for your service.
2. Did anyone say something about "only" here that I missed? I just want it added.
Everything else you wrote seems based on a significant misinterpretation of what I suggested. Maybe... ask a question next time?
dredmorbius 3 days ago [-]
So, question: is AppleID based on OAuth? And yeah, I'm underinformed on these, though I'll stand by at least some of my concerns applying.
Amongst the problems of adding a megacorp's identification protocols is that those have a strong tendency to embrace, extend, and extinguish (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...>). See what's happened to email, RCS messaging, and for that matter, online and social services themselves.
Again, the federated Mastodon poses a far lesser risk of this, though if that project were to be compromised it could go pear-shaped.
Schiendelman 3 days ago [-]
But Mastodon doesn't solve the stated goal by the service of why they want you to have a login. ;)
dredmorbius 3 days ago [-]
I asked a specific question, per your request.
You've ignored it.
As for the stated reasons for utilising Mastodon as a sign-on service, Bubbles seems to share my views:
Why Fediverse and not email/password login?
We don't want to manage accounts. No passwords to store, no emails to verify, no spam accounts to moderate. The Fediverse handles identity for us, and no single company controls it.
It's difficult to tell what you're hinting at so long as you're not being explicit, but if your concern is that Mastodon accounts permit multiple votes per individual, yes, that would be an issue. However there are few systems which afford a hard guarantee against that (though many might increase costs), and there are other ways of identifying coordinated or fraudulent voting patterns (talk with the HN mods about that some time, or any collaborative-filtering / collective-voting based discussion platform).
What happens when the instance admin gets bored? Fediverse doesn't to my knowledge have a good migration policy. I can't imagine this is recommended since even the forum hosting related proposals [1] requires email.
I saw it and completed it as “top posts” “new posts” “hot posts” “my posts”.
janaagaard 4 days ago [-]
I think the links should open in the same window (like they do here on HN) instead of in a new tab/window. If I want a separate tab, I can Cmd+click and Browsers don't have the reverse option for opening in the same window.
viermalbe 4 days ago [-]
Bubbles dev here, I've heard you loud and clear and follow the discussion closely.
I will change the default behaviour to open links in the same tab like on HN or Lobsters soon. But first the HN visitor wave needs to calm down.
mindtricks 3 days ago [-]
So many comments debating the philosophy around this. I like it when these type of sites open a new tab for me. Is there a way to just code in a toggle between the two link opening types?
hallway_monitor 3 days ago [-]
This is the type of thing I have to fight against daily. You already have both action available - left click or middle click. Don't bloat your software with band aids for problems that don't exist - just train your users better.
3 days ago [-]
zenoprax 3 days ago [-]
Middle-click a link to open a new tab. I can't force a link to open in the same window but I can with new tabs.
Sometimes it's easier to follow a link, have a look, and then go back without jumping around tabs.
account42 3 days ago [-]
If only mouse manufacturers would use middle click buttons that are designed for more than occasional use.
Sn0wCoder 3 days ago [-]
wow, always right clicked then clicked open in new tab. Middle click now saves me one click - thanks!
mirrorlake 3 days ago [-]
I always bind a side button on my gaming mice to ctrl+click so that my thumb can open links in a new tab. Slight ergonomic improvement for me.
derkades 3 days ago [-]
ctrl+click works too!
rovr138 3 days ago [-]
I like that in Kagi I can set this as an option.
Default, on the same tab (since browsers have options around this), but allow users to select if they want it on a new tab/window.
Shank 3 days ago [-]
You can set a user preference to open in a new tab. The reverse is not true.
zamadatix 3 days ago [-]
I don't think most browsers have such an option, doubly so on mobile. They just assume the user will open the link in the way they'd like.
basch 3 days ago [-]
The reason it’s a debate is because both interfaces / flows are broken.
Back/forth, new tab, currently open tab switch, bookmark, needs to be redesigned from first principal. They all approximate different versions of similar intents.
fuzzfactor 3 days ago [-]
Looks like a pretty good aggregation.
Kind of like a subset of what appears here but of course concentrated on blogs not other sources of news.
Looking at other comments some people are definitely going to prefer each link to open in its own tab.
One thing I see is because so many blogs are no different than a dead website for anybody using full security and privacy on their browser.
You wouldn't want your main page to turn into a dud every time somebody clicked on one of these dud blogs which are randomly scattered among the good links.
OTOH if you curated the blogs which are universal good links separately from the ones requiring the least bit of friction or compromise to security or privacy, that would be something I haven't seen anyone else do.
And it's needed now more than ever, plus the need's only going to increase.
speak_plainly 3 days ago [-]
Thanks for adding RSS! Bringing Bubbles (and HN) into NetNewsWire is a game-changer for content discovery and keeping a clean reading list.
bookofjoe 4 days ago [-]
Too bad it's so hard to submit a suggested blog.
moebrowne 3 days ago [-]
Making it too easy invites spam.
Sending a single email seems like a good compromise to me.
bookofjoe 3 days ago [-]
I agree, that would be a good compromise and I would do it in a heartbeat, but that's NOT the procedure. More is required:
>Participating
>You log in with a Fediverse account (Mastodon, Pixelfed, GoToSocial, and others). If you don't have one, mastodon.social is free and takes two minutes.
For non-techies like me, Fediverse accounts and mastodon.social are non-starters.
Too bad.
A single email WOULD be great, as you point out.
krapp 3 days ago [-]
>For non-techies like me, Fediverse accounts and mastodon.social are non-starters.
You can literally sign up for a Mastodon account on mastodon.social or most other instances through the web like any other website. It's no more difficult than a Reddit account.
bookofjoe 3 days ago [-]
2 things:
1) Neither I nor most non-techies have a clue what an "instance" is.
2) Reddit banned me years ago for no reason I could think of.
krapp 2 days ago [-]
1) literally millions of people, many of whom are non-techies, have figured it out, just like they figured out what "subreddits" were and what "tweets" were and the specific quirks of numerous other platforms.
2) yes the people who own servers get to decide what happens on them. That isn't a feature (or bug) of the fediverse its just the way networks work. But if you don't want to join an instance you can get one hosted on a service like masto.host (the one I use) for very little.
viermalbe 3 days ago [-]
Sign-in is only needed to interact with the site, like voting or hiding entries. If you want to suggest your own blog, just send a mail to suggest@bubbles.town as described in the FAQ.
zer00eyz 3 days ago [-]
> For non-techies like me, Fediverse accounts and mastodon.social are non-starters.
For technical people these things should be non starters as well. It is a group of people who should be acutely aware of everything wrong with social media, and many are not.
From: Benjamin Behnke <ben@viermal.be>
Date: June 17, 2026 at 12:32:25 PM EDT
To: josephstirt@gmail.com
Subject: Re: I am submitting my blog for your consideration: https://bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for reaching out. Your post frequency is too high to be listed on Bubbles. You are publishing 3 articles per day. To quote from the criteria listed in the FAQ:
Moderate pace. Not more than one or two posts per day on average. Bubbles is for writers, not content machines.
I hope you'll understand. Let me know if you plan to slow down :)
Cheers,
Ben
moebrowne 2 days ago [-]
Do you write a bunch of posts and the schedule them? You put out 3 posts every single day at exactly 0800, 1200 and 1600.
bookofjoe 2 days ago [-]
Yes. Just so. From 2004 to 2014 I published 8 (eight) posts daily, every day, one minute after the hour. They appeared at 8:01/9:01/10:01/11:01 am; 12:01/1:01/2:01/3:01 pm.
ykonstant 3 days ago [-]
Oh my.
matheusmoreira 3 days ago [-]
Is there some kind of process? I have a small website where I write articles, mainly about my programming language implementation.
AbuAssar 4 days ago [-]
nope, I prefer open in new tab by default
kpopendurer 4 days ago [-]
In general, it's better not to force an action onto users. You might prefer things opening in a new tab, but you always have that option. If it's forced on users, it is frustrating for those who would prefer that not to happen.
complianceowll 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ffsm8 4 days ago [-]
And yet we're here, discussing how a developer should change their own application because their preference is wrong
If you don't like it, adjust it for yourself with an extension or script.
adrithmetiqa 4 days ago [-]
Exactly. This is a design choice and there’s no right or wrong here.
hk__2 4 days ago [-]
Yes there is a right and wrong. The default browser behavior is the design that every user expects, so unless there is a very strong argument for a different way, this is the _right_ design.
jaapz 4 days ago [-]
the difference is that with tab-open default, there is no way for me to open the link in this window
with this-window default (or actually, the browser-default-default), I can middle click and it'll open in a new tab regardless
pretty funny to have this discussion though, takes me back to the HTML4 and XHTML days
cstever 4 days ago [-]
XHTML ftw :)
locknitpicker 3 days ago [-]
> Exactly. This is a design choice and there’s no right or wrong here.
I don't agree. If your design choice forces a user flow that is surprising, awkward, and redundant then it's definitely the wrong choice. It's still a call to be made by the design team, though.
superxpro12 4 days ago [-]
i mean, is a small user preferences page out of the question here? the majority of web users arent going to write a js extension.
ffsm8 4 days ago [-]
You don't need to write one? Just write a ublock origin rule, use grease monkey or whatever is used nowadays.
Or just configure your browser to ignore the target param, eg browser.link.open_newwindow_restriction 0 in about:config
The fact I've gotten so many down votes for my previous comment really nails the point down how HN isn't really used by technical people anymore. It's mostly idiots with opinions.
edoceo 4 days ago [-]
Wrong again.
The idiots here are arguing to follow default, de-facto specifications and to give users an easy accessible choice.
chrysoprace 4 days ago [-]
That's a good user setting, but as opening in the same tab is the default browser behaviour then it should really stay that way. Opening in a new tab takes control away from the user.
el_io 4 days ago [-]
Exactly. I prefer to open in the same page. If I want to open in new tab then I can always Ctrl + Click.
I don't think I can do the reverse though.
RossBencina 4 days ago [-]
This. Principle of least surprise.
reactordev 4 days ago [-]
Next they’ll be defending full screen div paywalls.
Telaneo 4 days ago [-]
I too prefer that, but i don't want to force that choice on othet people.
CTRL+left click is ingrained in me now anyway.
giancarlostoro 4 days ago [-]
I'd rather have an icon next to the link that implies "Open in new Tab" like one of these with the arrow:
> I'd rather have an icon next to the link that implies "Open in new Tab" like one of these with the arrow:
That is a valid option for detachable UI elements seen in desktop apps.
Opening links in a separate tab or window is not that thought. That is a first class user flow in web design.
rafterydj 4 days ago [-]
I do as well, but I think it's good practice to put something like in a user preference setting somewhere if you are going to stray from default browser/system behavior.
netfortius 4 days ago [-]
100% agree. I had to install a browser extension when I use HN with such (vs app on android, when it does it by default), just to force open links to new tabs.
wredcoll 3 days ago [-]
Have you considered middle clicking instead of leftclicking?
dotproto 2 days ago [-]
Ctrl+Click / Cmd+Click also opens in a new tab.
akoboldfrying 4 days ago [-]
And people who prefer the other way can just hold down _____ while clicking to open it in the current tab instead.
Good ol' _____-clicking saves the day again!
em-bee 4 days ago [-]
only on a mac, and probably only on safari which leaves the majority of people in the lurch.
akoboldfrying 4 days ago [-]
I was trying to sarcastically imply that no such same-tab-enabling key existed, and that this was therefore a bad suggestion. (Didn't know it does exist on Safari either!)
em-bee 3 days ago [-]
oh, sorry, your suggestion wasn't unrealistic enough to not be believable so my sarcasm detector failed.
i took ___ to mean the option key which has this symbol made up of lines: "⌥", it is also the key most likely to be used for such a feature, so i figured that's what you must be talking about.
if you weren't then the key most certainly doesn't exist on a mac either, and i apologize for the downvote. unfortunately it appears that i can't undo it anymore so i hope someone else will compensate with an upvote.
akoboldfrying 3 days ago [-]
No worries :)
3 days ago [-]
AbuAssar 4 days ago [-]
why the downvotes, I meant to demonstrate that I prefer the current behaviour so the site developer knows.
SilentM68 3 days ago [-]
Don't feel bad. I've been down-votted and banned into obscurity meerly for providing my opinion. Do as I did, get a gigantic list of all legislators and government officials, sent them a nice letter informing them of how HN's policies are rotten to the core. In my case I took screenshots, sent those too. When I post something such as now, only I can see it while logged in. When logged off, I can't see my posts. Will take pictures in both states, send those pictures to those legislators in my list :)
Sol Roth
Annex HN
Wilduck 3 days ago [-]
The downvotes are because the discussion isn't really about "which option do users prefer". It's actually about returning user choice. As the original comment said: "If I want a separate tab, I can Cmd+click and Browsers don't have the reverse option for opening in the same window."
So when you say "Nope!", you're being downvoted because you're implicitly saying "actually users don't deserve choice".
billnad 3 days ago [-]
I like the new tab as well. Otherwise I will forget what I went to. My process is to go through an interesting site, like HN, and then be able to see these interesting sites after that.
I guess it depends on a persons web workflow though
markdown 4 days ago [-]
The downvoters meant to demonstrate that they prefer the standard/expected behavior and would like OP to ignore your opinion on the matter.
kbelder 3 days ago [-]
I didn't downvote, because the poster had a reasonable opinion stated politely, but I still really hope the OP ignores his opinion.
4 days ago [-]
bovermyer 4 days ago [-]
The Briefings have been most useful for me. It feels more curated and less firehose-y.
Also, showing the excerpts from the post text is vastly superior to just showing the post titles.
viermalbe 4 days ago [-]
I currently work on a feature to show excerpts (and read time) in the list views as well. But I will wait with the deployment until the Hacker News visitor wave has calmed down.
lapcat 4 days ago [-]
> and read time
If anything, I would recommend a word count instead.
Word count is objective. Read time is subjective, variable, just an estimate, and probably based on word count anyway.
Any plans to add Lemmy federation? It would be nice to be able to follow it as a Lemmy community since it works like a federated hn/Reddit.
samtheDamned 3 days ago [-]
This would be really cool. With the process of allowing fediverse logins it would be nice to also be able to use lemmy accounts since right now those don't seem to work. (That might be related to the HN hug though I'm not sure).
stakhanov 4 days ago [-]
I'm curious: What software is driving this? Is it a re-skin of the lobste.rs or HN open source software, or is it its own thing?
EDIT: ...just realized that's in the FAQ.
> Is it open source?
> Not yet. Maybe someday.
viermalbe 4 days ago [-]
It runs on Go + sqlite on a Hetzner machine, built from scratch, not a re-skin.
Semaphor 4 days ago [-]
Clearly inspired by HN, there are few sites where I have to zoom in to get any kind of readability ;)
TopHatHipster 4 days ago [-]
What type of Hetzner box are you running this on?
embedding-shape 4 days ago [-]
> not a re-skin
Is that something you're frequently accused of, or why the "disclaimer"?
drcongo 4 days ago [-]
They were directly answering the post above which asked if it's a re-skin.
BrenBarn 4 days ago [-]
The comment they were replying to specifically asked if it was a re-skin.
embedding-shape 4 days ago [-]
Ah yes of course, finally paid the price of reading comments in isolation. Thanks and sorry :)
viermalbe 4 days ago [-]
Not really, I just picked it up from the initial question from stakhanov.
AbuAssar 4 days ago [-]
how do you decide which blog is included in the aggregation?
Waiting for the inflection point that all social sites go through: When a social site's top content stops being about itself, then it is probably going to be successful.
A second corollary: When a social site's top content stops being about the internet, then it is probably going to be even more successful.
altairprime 3 days ago [-]
Ah, I love a good classic curated-authors aggregator. The days of yore have returned! Gives me hope. And thank you for having posts open to HN, that’s a brilliant way to augment rather than displace.
On first glance, the first several posts are more interesting than HN; that’s a good sign. But there’s no hide link to mask the AI posts I don’t care about; perhaps one appears after signup?
But. HN’s single-post mute method is treading water at best versus the flood, and with the sixth post on the homepage being outsourced-to-AI, clearly that will persist at Bubbles. Can I mute specific blogs that are just repeatedly posting ‘I subcontracted my project to AI and am now taking credit as if I did the work myself’ on this site? If so, I’d give this a full week tryout immediately.
viermalbe 3 days ago [-]
Hide button appears after sign-in. You can eather hide individual posts or specific blogs.
RobotToaster 4 days ago [-]
It would be great if this supported federation as a Lemmy community, given that Lemmy already has votes.
wwfn 3 days ago [-]
Excited to see this get traction! Federated voting and comments on top of RSS has an indie-web elegance to it.
Indulging in meta-commentary: The HN submit history for bubbles.town is interesting. Took 7 tries to reach the front page. The final viral title resembles the supposed-LLM-tell "X not Y." Coincidence or evidence that the models touch on a useful way to communicate ideas. (I only looked because I submitted the one 2 weeks ago.)
436 points 3 days ago Hacker News but for independent blogs
3 points 4 days ago Bubbles – community-ranked feed of blog posts
3 points 13 days ago A community-ranked feed of blog posts from curated sources
3 points 20 days ago Bubbles – an HN-like link aggregator for the non-tech internet
1 point 28 days ago Bubbles: Blog Post Discovery
4 points 50 days ago Bubbles
6 points 75 days ago Bubbles – HN-like frontpage for personal indie blogs
jdiff 3 days ago [-]
"X but for Y" has been around for a good long time, it long predates (and I would say is significantly distinct from) "not X, but Y"
wwfn 2 days ago [-]
I think they're both "negative parallelism" constructs. Either way, neither are new.
The prose on https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/its-not-just-data-its-pos... changed how I think about it: the framework is useful for reasoning, not lazy writing. This bubbles.town submission's title could be light evidence of negative parallelism's utility. (Or, more likely, just the stochastic nature of what's popular when)
dchuk 3 days ago [-]
Nice job, clean and well built. I built something very similar, with a focus on engineering/product/startup blogs https://engineered.at
What's your tech stack? Mine is pretty vanilla ruby on rails, while my site is closed source, I did open source a rails engine for adaptive monitoring of RSS feeds that does a lot of the heavy lifting: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
adrianwaj 3 days ago [-]
The summaries are a great idea.
It would be interesting to extract devices and inventions from articles to create an "inventions race" (as opposed to "arms race.") It could be used to establish prior-art and negate a lot of expensive and unnecessary patents that end up going nowhere or used for trolling. That's something I have been thinking about for tinkeri.ng. Something comparable to a patent archive - but used for networking and sharing. Would end up looking like a wiki with articles getting pingbacks.
dchuk 3 days ago [-]
It’s funny, sites like these are so divisive. I’ve gotten as many “do not llm summarize anything for me” as I’ve gotten “this is super handy!” responses. I like them, so I’m keeping them.
Interesting idea overall. Could be generalized to just general trend identification I think based on named entity recognition (like google trends). Over time you can trace first mentions of stuff and buzz over time. I’ll noodle on it.
adrianwaj 3 days ago [-]
Yep, you could have an options menu (like at hcker.news) and have the ability to switch the summaries off or even extend them? Could also make them blacker and larger?
Also, looks like ArticlesBase stopped in 2024 - maybe offer a way for users to upload articles, summarize them and then people can micropay to read? Maybe just charge for older articles? Can also charge for extra long articles? Put everything into an LLM?
dchuk 2 days ago [-]
I’ve been noodling on an idea sort of similar, which is to have a system where if you register for an account and very your site (with a technical mechanism in place to enforce that), you get a slight boost in the ranking algorithm for your content. Then, if you pay a small monthly fee, you get an additional boost in rankings, as well as some amount of (anonymized appropriately) analytics about your content performance on the site. Not sure if anyone would ever want to use that and I don’t have anywhere near the traffic for that to be worth it yet, but seems worth playing with.
I also want to add content digests/newsletters that highlights best content of the week for sharing on twitter and via email to those who register accounts. Typical growth marketing stuff
adrianwaj 2 days ago [-]
Yep. Verifying is good practice.
Regarding Wordpress, I've found it still lacks a decent search plugin. Could you make one? Charge for it, accept outside pings, take in full feeds and provide a search box in return for subsequent display on individual sites.
Also, pitch your aggregator as well as something that'll "pull in more engaged readers into your site." Perhaps the search box could be "search this site only" / "search all engineered blogs."
You could also make the plugin free, but charge for accepting more than 10(?) pings per month. If you create a specialized LLM, you could also offer some type of shared ownership too to encourage cooperation.
Crowdsourcing content is another interesting area to watch where writers propose an article and it gets funded beforehand. Those articles could end up being open-source ideas with actionable information. Having built up a reputation and readership would make successful crowdfunding more likely.
zingar 4 days ago [-]
Is this “hacker news”-esque in terms of being a social bookmarking site? I don’t see much by way of the same topics, and don’t think the difference is only whether it’s Indy or not.
rsolva 4 days ago [-]
Oh, great, I can log in with my GoToSocial instance to comment and vote! I will definitely add this site alongside my HN addiction :)
atulvi 4 days ago [-]
> "5011 independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you."
That line is so claude.
kenanfyi 4 days ago [-]
I thought the same. I like the idea of it and probably use it to find nice blogs, but it looks like AI-coded.
I was there, literally, 5 seconds and already saw a headline that pissed me off.
No thanks, I don't need any extra stress in my life.
the_lonely_phon 3 days ago [-]
Was it the one where doing yoga and eating healthy is a white supremacist dog whistle?
NoSalt 3 days ago [-]
Bingo!
derangedHorse 3 days ago [-]
Same haha
3 days ago [-]
3 days ago [-]
DoctorOW 3 days ago [-]
This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I've been feeling like HN feels more and more repetitive.
Finnucane 3 days ago [-]
It's not stated explicitly, but I would assume that 'independent' blog means no Substack, no Medium, etc? Is that the case?
viermalbe 3 days ago [-]
Independent does not mean self-hosted. Blog platforms are ok if the content is not monetized, no adverts, no paywalls, no self-marketing. For full criteria see the FAQs.
Finnucane 3 days ago [-]
Isn't the whole point of Substack, etc. monetization, one way or another? Maybe I'm just a cranky old man, but that to me goes against 'independent'. But then, I'm not just old enough to remember when blogs weren't monetized, but remembering perusing Factsheet Five to see if there were any interesting new zines to trade with. Maybe you could mark the Substack blogs with a little swastika like an asterisk.
ozgrakkurt 4 days ago [-]
This is it!! I can finally leave reading comments on hn or get bamboozeled by ai posts masquerading as something technical
eduction 3 days ago [-]
The title is wrong as they are not just different in sourcing but topic.
A better title would be "Hacker News but for general content from independent blogs."
Hacker News but for independent blogs would be the same topic as HN but only stuff from independent blogs.
This is avowedly broad: "Hacker News and Lobste.rs have community voting figured out, but non-tech content gets drowned by the tech majority"
You can email the mods and ask them to consider your edits; they may well agree. Just include a link to your thread with reasoning here so they can log the change in reply if they do so.
KerryJones 3 days ago [-]
Curious on your "Top" algorithm? I see many 1-voted items there.
Also, how do you vet your blogs?
1317 4 days ago [-]
looks quite nice, but i always find myself disappointed that all the content on the "small web" is just posting /about/ the small web, rather than doing anything interesting on it
14/30 of the posts on the top page are just about making websites
cosmicgadget 3 days ago [-]
I can say from experience that the small web has considerable breadth. I think what you're seeing here is a product of the small, curated list of sites combined with the recency bias of a feed data view.
You'll see similar results from the various indieweb indexes that primarily use the kagi RSS list from github; this list attracts a specific segment of the blogosphere.
1317 2 days ago [-]
thanks for recommending kagi small web, just going through their random posts page i've already seen lots of nice stuff on there
altairprime 3 days ago [-]
Long ago when we didn’t have Movable Type and every blog was either a work journal on a gopher prefix or a hand-maintained directory of HTML files, this was always the case; a significant fraction, if not an outright majority, of the people willing to try out new styles of interaction are also going to post introspectively about styles of interaction. Developing communities requires discussing developing communities, after all! So it is normal for something that is ‘bubbling’ up from the cauldron of experiments to have a degree of navel-gazing inherent in it — and given how catastrophically blogging went once it lost that aspect, I can accept some amount of ‘seeing how the social structure sausage is made’ if it shifts the overall scales back towards meaningful.
HardwareLust 4 days ago [-]
Please make AI a category.
rvba 4 days ago [-]
Ao refreshing that new links open in new windows - such a time saver dor those pf us who open hundreds of windows.
Top does not sort? Also "top" is what exactly? All time? Today?
How do you defend against brigading?
Honest_Carrot 3 days ago [-]
I agree, clarity would be nice here. Similarly, I would like to be able to see top week/month/year.
Just curious but isn't this just digg, metafilter?
altairprime 3 days ago [-]
No, those are general-any link posting. This is more like Planet Mozilla, which used to be maintained as a curated aggregator of the personal blogs of contributors to the Mozilla project, which was not filtered exclusively to their Mozilla-content posts. Bubbles accretes on a different criteria than that, but at its core is similarly centered first around ‘curated authors’ rather than ‘curated links’, and then second around publishing all posts by a curated author. That curation is what makes it more valuable than a generic-any site aggregator like Digg or HN: a post by a curated human is much more likely to be interesting than the majority slop of /new on any content-first aggregation site (Imgur is a great example of this!).
sailfast 4 days ago [-]
Came here to say this. Perhaps it will work this time if it tries not to scale wildly, take investor money, and just do one thing well with a smaller group? But this kind of site has been around.
johnea 3 days ago [-]
Can you pipe those posts to an IRC channel?
mmarian 3 days ago [-]
I'd love to see something like this but a bit more business-y, although not big tech business, neither just indie hacking promos. Maybe I'm too picky...
altairprime 3 days ago [-]
There aren't many business-y people with public blogs that aren't just PR outlets for, if not outright hosted by, their business. They do exist but it's a very quantity-limiting criteria, as (unlike the general population) success in business tends to be accompanied by wariness of speaking openly in publicly-indexed venues such as blogs. No shame in having a picky preference! But worth keeping in mind. (ps. You might appreciate the Scope of Work slack!)
mmarian 3 days ago [-]
You're right. Had a look at Scope of Work, looks really cool but I'm not into any hardware whatsoever unfortunately. Appreciate the suggestion though!
altairprime 6 hours ago [-]
Rands slack? It’s really, really not my cup of tea but if you’re dead set on a high concentration of MBA and can tolerate what I assume is a lot of support for AI, it’s probably the one community I know of that’s open to walk-ups.
mmarian 5 hours ago [-]
Looks interesting, been thinking of moving into tech leadership. I'll sign up to it, thanks for the suggestion!
alfirous 2 days ago [-]
Now one thing is missing for me is Hacker News for design. Something like Designer News which sadly is gone. The close I found is Sidebar[1] but do not have comments section for discussion.
Obligatory mention of Minifeed, a curated directory, reader and search engine for personal blogs: https://minifeed.net/
I’ve been running it for a few years now. You can build a personal feed, follow others, see related blogs and posts, and use full-text search across all blogs.
>More garbage about white supremacy and how Trump bad
>Close site and don't bother to remember its name
This isn't normal and this isn't how the Internet used to be
agup792 4 days ago [-]
I like it, but shouldn't this be part of "Show HN"?
gus_massa 4 days ago [-]
For a "Show HN", the OP must be the author. The project has been posted a few times in the last months without look by different persons.
agup792 3 days ago [-]
Ah, okay, thanks for your reply. I understand now.
ochronus 4 days ago [-]
This is lovely
sph 3 days ago [-]
> independent blogs
> looks inside
> american politics and culture war
I guess my choice is Hacker News with its AI obsession, or just abandoning the internet. There is no escaping the shit that has infected the rest of social media
holtwick 4 days ago [-]
I love it!
pchm 4 days ago [-]
I submitted a somewhat similar project yesterday to Show HN (didn’t resonate), although mine is purely based on AI scoring, with zero community features.
I call it bubblewire. Funny. I had no prior knowledge of bubbles.town until seeing it here now.
bubbles.town looks nice! Hope to see more projects that aim to bring back the good old web.
> (didn’t resonate), although mine is purely based on AI scoring
One reason for it not resonating might be that it’s yet another opaque algorithmic feed in a moment in time where people are getting sick and tired of them and wary of their manipulative features. And HN is so inundated with AI submissions that having yet another Show HN about it is uninteresting to many.
Would you visit HN if it were just a link aggregator whose ranking was decided by hidden logic of a machine? A lot of people wouldn’t. We’re a social species, there is value in human curation—especially when driven by the community—that’s inherently lacking from algorithmic curation (AI or otherwise).
pchm 4 days ago [-]
That's true, provided that all activity (comments, voting) here is still coming from actual humans. That's no longer the case for community websites, I'm afraid.
It's an experiment made for the web of 2026, where you can no longer tell if the users are humans or bots.
If nobody's interested in that idea, I accept that.
akoboldfrying 4 days ago [-]
> Would you visit HN if were just a link aggregator whose ranking was decided by hidden logic of a machine?
I assumed it was...?
If not, who or what decides the ranking moment-by-moment? dang?
agmater 4 days ago [-]
It's based on votes mainly. This is covered in the FAQ [1] and the exact algorithm has also been shared in the past [2].
I think it's great. I don't mind the AI ranking system (it beats a free for all), though it's a bit like HN where only a few posts appeal to me.
I'd have upvoted you but I think you got eaten by /new.
3 days ago [-]
barddoo 3 days ago [-]
nice
chmod775 3 days ago [-]
Some of these submissions would put satirists out of a job.
sdsd 3 days ago [-]
I love this, but while we're here I was wondering if any of you could recommend small niche Youtube channels that you love? I don't care what the niche is, I just love passionate oddballs.
this old tony, Chronova engineering, cylo's garage, inheritance machining, breaking taps, blondie hacks, tarkka, dan gelbert, Jonesey Makes, Eric(with a K), Clough42, Alec steele, NBR Works, Not An engineer, Stefan Gotteswinter, oxtoolco, ROBRENZ, MrCrispin, Clickspring, Artisan Makes, MH Anything, Jellyfish machine,Maker B,
And also there is great course on precision engineering by Alex slocum
3 days ago [-]
bad_username 3 days ago [-]
Open...
"the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle"
Close... guess I will stick to HN
easterncalculus 3 days ago [-]
Exactly what I thought.
The beginning of the end of the free and open internet was the rise of the walled garden. The final nail in the coffin is that every search result for "independent blogs" and "free and open internet" these days goes to politically challenged morons like this.
Simply put, the people running their own websites and blogs aren't "normal" anymore. The "normal" people are on the big platforms, unfortunately.
sph 3 days ago [-]
Despite its faults, what makes HN different is that it has principled moderators.
Content aside, not my thing either, I actually did really like this one. It has so much personality it reminded me of the early MySpace days before we all became identical looking Facebook timelines.
nozzlegear 3 days ago [-]
Visually difficult to read with all of the colors, but I thought the content was good.
zimzalabimzim 3 days ago [-]
i was wondering where all this traffic was coming from lmao. this is my blog. i actually am not super familiar with JS so i somehow broke my easy-reading mode toggle but usually its there, black background on white text. sorry!!
nozzlegear 3 days ago [-]
No worries! It was probably there, I didn't actually look for it. I just figured the colors were part of the vibe you were going for with your blog so I read through it regardless.
Good luck with the convention if you decide to go!
3 days ago [-]
TacticalCoder 4 days ago [-]
Holy smoke the bullshit I see upvoted on that site frontpage mate! Fitness is "white supremacism"!?
A few lines from that "the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle" frontpage articles (that title, already):
> I cannot help but see that “Pinterest clean girl fitness and fruit bowl gua sha yoga mat pilates in the forest” content as covert white supremacy and eugenicist ideals
Let people live ffs!
> it’s always white or racially ambiguous people,
"Racially ambiuous"? For a start it's an attempt at manipulating thought by manipulating speech. Then it's deeply racist: it's wanting to categorize people by race, to hate on them. In this case putting, for example, latino-whites (I'm not saying it, TFA is) or half-asian/half-white (like my nephew) as "white" to hate on whites. It has a name:
racism.
Anti-white racism, but racism (usually double-down by explaining that it's impossible to be racists towards whites for anti-white racism is impossible).
And at the gym and among my friends, I see a lot of these "yoga girls" are with... asian genes. Same online among the fitness "influencers" with many subscribers.
There are also a huge lot of incredibly muscular and fit... Blacks. What a surprise: blacks ain't white.
How can someone be filled with so much hate (including, potentially, hate for its own race) to write such hateful texts?
Despicable author, writing hateful words, to please people with really dark hearts.
mikestew 3 days ago [-]
More of a meta discussion of an aggregator, don’t you think? It would likely be more productive to go complain in the comments of that singular blog.
kbelder 3 days ago [-]
The specific topic of that blog post aside, any aggregation of 'indy' and 'small' content producers is going to lean kind of weird. Maybe left, maybe right, hopefully a combination of both, but it's going to have all sorts of crazy posts like that, all sorts of nutty niches.
That's at least interesting, in an old-school-internet kind of way. Hopefully it doesn't get captured by one clique or another.
DeusExMachina 3 days ago [-]
> Hopefully it doesn't get captured by one clique or another.
Given that it's the most-voted post, it looks like it already happened.
3 days ago [-]
intrikate 3 days ago [-]
This reads like a kneejerk reaction to the title, which I understand. I think it's deliberately written that way to draw you in, but I get how it could be upsetting.
Her point isn't that "fitness is white supremacy," and not even remotely close. Just that the social media and culture around wellness and fitness can give off white supremacist, fascist energy by presenting an extremely unobtainable and yet highly idealized state of being, where everyone is very thin and white and fits within the stereotypes of the gender assigned to them, which is not remotely how the world at large can be.
Actually, reading it again, I don't see the author calling out anyone in particular, just noting that the culture around a thing they otherwise enjoy makes them uncomfortable, and why.
al_borland 3 days ago [-]
That was to draw the reader in? I found that title so off-putting that I didn’t even bother to look at the site as a whole.
Your comment made me actually go click through to see who wrote it, as I was curious… a white girl from Germany. It seems very possible that her algorithm is feeding her mostly white European fitness influencers, because she herself is a white European girl. That isn’t inherently wrong and there is no supremacy at play.
vee-kay 4 days ago [-]
Ah, this reminds me of StumbleUpon.
ChrisArchitect 3 days ago [-]
first thing that caught my eye was "Bubbles mentioned in Verge newsletter" .... that's a post from a "Hand-picked blog"? Thought it was supposed to be non-tech? Definitely don't want to see posts about tech posts from the sloppy tech duplicating press. We have HN for that!
It feels really refreshing compared to doomscrolling of social media, or indeed even to HN. It’s so diverse and humane. The indie blogosphere is coming to life.
Kudos to the author. A great idea, splendidly executed. I hope it grows and doesn’t change much.
The "My" tab looks like it covers the same ground as a feed reader would. I wonder who the audience is for that feature.
It’s a failing of aggregators that they optimize for attention concentration rather than interestingness. But is there even such a thing, objectively?
With sufficiently rich data, I think they're equivalent.
I think collaborative filtering works much better once you have a critical mass of users/data - enough that taste clusters emerge. Otherwise it just defaults to whatever's globally popular. Google Reader managed it quite well. Librarything is fantastic at it (far better than Amazon).
I wrote a simple recommendation engine for musical taste in the early 2k's (pre-last.fm), but it had very little data available to it. The result? It recommended Radiohead to everyone. (Looking back, this was my first exposure to The Bitter Lesson).
Opened the page, first entry: „white supremacist dogwhistle“
One can’t make this much diversity and humaneness up.
Yes, their frontpage overall seems normal and you probably meant well, but that this is their first entry is just hilarious.
The point the author is trying to cover is that a lifestyle and aesthetic the author naturally aligns with actually actively excludes her - and that pattern is seen elsewhere and (author opinion) has wider implications.
I’d argue it’s a fair and not a political statement (there is some text that indicates the preference of the author) but a human realizing and sharing their exclusion from a group and that the exclusion expands into (again, author perspective) defined categories of people. Talking about thoughts and opinions is… what I expect from a blog.
*Link: https://bubbles.town/rss
For the list views you can use the filter menu to filter by min votes or subscribe to any of the min vote rss feeds.
Social media is dead, and has been for a while. Many use it still, but it is not primarily social. The social part was mainly a ploy to get peoples attention and then badly abusing it in ever more creative and sinister ways.
I don't use Facebook but use it for auth when I have no other option.
Even worse, I don't want an external service federating my identity when I can avoid it. We have all heard of people getting locked out in cases where Google decided to ban a user from their platform.
I'm never trusting an external provider again.
It's just a protocol Email uses SMTP to push text from @domainA to @domainB. The Fediverse uses ActivityPub to push JSON-LD from @domainA to @domainB.
It's also vastly easier to self-host than email.
How on earth do you get people to talk in IRC? Am I missing something? Almost every channel I have joined is dead silent, and any time I tried starting a conversation I felt like I was asking Lebowski for my money.
You make it sound as if that's undesirable.
Social media is dead, and has been for a while. Many use it still, but it is not primarily social. The social part was mainly a ploy to get peoples attention and then badly abusing it in ever more creative and sinister ways.
EDIT: This comment was meant to be posted to the parent comment!
1. It enables correlation, tracking, and stalking across sites.
2. It makes people vulnerable to being locked out of that single-ID provider.
3. It makes people vulnerable across multiple services to a compromise of that single-ID provider.
4. It risks alleged abuse at any one service relying on the single-ID provider causing problems with other services, or the SIDP itself. Reputation attacks, Joe Jobs, and the like become attack vectors.
5. In the specific case of Apple, the represented population is small enough that sites relying on it would exclude a huge number of people, if there were no other alternatives.
I'm of an age and from a time in which one didn't use one's real name online, with very rare exceptions, and in which compartmentalising activities into different independent services. Service consolidation, where a small set of ogolopolistic actors snap up previously independent companies, and then decide to forcibly integrate those services, is yet another problem. One of the highest-voted HN submissions I've been associated with was my own report of this happening, 13 years ago, on Google+: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731>. (The submission was by @davidgerard, but was based on my own G+ experience.) The original G+ content is archived here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20120118044728/https://plus.goog...>. NB: the discussion on that thread is quite interesting.
Relevance being I've been following this practice for a long time. Well before the G+ post mentioned as well.
The backstory on that post: not only had Google integrated previously independent G+ and YouTube accounts, but it did so based on email address, often linking real-name and pseudonymous accounts. Several people found themselves outed in different, and more significant ways, including revealing personal, social, political, or other aspects with public and professional accounts.
I'd already preempted this to a large extent by acting when I first heard the "Google+ is an identity network" comment by then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt to NPR reporter Andy Carvin in an impromptu and unscheduled interview, in 2011. I deleted the several-weeks-old personally-identifying G+ account, and employed my "dredmorbius" persona to create a new account.
See "Google+ is an identity service, says Schmidt" <https://www.marketplace.org/story/2011/08/29/google-identity...> based on the G+ account by Carvin, archived here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20111015105327/https://plus.goog...>.
Online identifiers serve multiple purposes. I don't mind having a persistent identity as "dredmorbius" or occasionally "Doc Edward Morbius" (I've deliberately avoided using "Dr." for some time to avoid falsely claiming any unwarranted credentials). But where I don't care to have that association made, I have, or create, other independent aliases.
My general feeling is that ID systems should be at a minimum-viable-level basis, and largely a separate consideration from another often-conflated aspect, reputation.
2. Did anyone say something about "only" here that I missed? I just want it added.
Everything else you wrote seems based on a significant misinterpretation of what I suggested. Maybe... ask a question next time?
Amongst the problems of adding a megacorp's identification protocols is that those have a strong tendency to embrace, extend, and extinguish (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...>). See what's happened to email, RCS messaging, and for that matter, online and social services themselves.
Again, the federated Mastodon poses a far lesser risk of this, though if that project were to be compromised it could go pear-shaped.
You've ignored it.
As for the stated reasons for utilising Mastodon as a sign-on service, Bubbles seems to share my views:
Why Fediverse and not email/password login?
We don't want to manage accounts. No passwords to store, no emails to verify, no spam accounts to moderate. The Fediverse handles identity for us, and no single company controls it.
It's difficult to tell what you're hinting at so long as you're not being explicit, but if your concern is that Mastodon accounts permit multiple votes per individual, yes, that would be an issue. However there are few systems which afford a hard guarantee against that (though many might increase costs), and there are other ways of identifying coordinated or fraudulent voting patterns (talk with the HN mods about that some time, or any collaborative-filtering / collective-voting based discussion platform).
> $N independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you.
This sounds a bit AI-generated (i.e. bland). I would just remove that line entirely from the UI.
> top / new / hot / my
this is a non-parallel construction[1], "my" sounds weird here to an english speaker. These can all be read as adjuncts if you change it to "mine".
[1] https://www.grammar.com/nonparallel-construction
[1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-521a-representing-...
I will change the default behaviour to open links in the same tab like on HN or Lobsters soon. But first the HN visitor wave needs to calm down.
Sometimes it's easier to follow a link, have a look, and then go back without jumping around tabs.
Default, on the same tab (since browsers have options around this), but allow users to select if they want it on a new tab/window.
Back/forth, new tab, currently open tab switch, bookmark, needs to be redesigned from first principal. They all approximate different versions of similar intents.
Kind of like a subset of what appears here but of course concentrated on blogs not other sources of news.
Looking at other comments some people are definitely going to prefer each link to open in its own tab.
One thing I see is because so many blogs are no different than a dead website for anybody using full security and privacy on their browser.
You wouldn't want your main page to turn into a dud every time somebody clicked on one of these dud blogs which are randomly scattered among the good links.
OTOH if you curated the blogs which are universal good links separately from the ones requiring the least bit of friction or compromise to security or privacy, that would be something I haven't seen anyone else do.
And it's needed now more than ever, plus the need's only going to increase.
Sending a single email seems like a good compromise to me.
>Participating
>You log in with a Fediverse account (Mastodon, Pixelfed, GoToSocial, and others). If you don't have one, mastodon.social is free and takes two minutes.
For non-techies like me, Fediverse accounts and mastodon.social are non-starters.
Too bad.
A single email WOULD be great, as you point out.
You can literally sign up for a Mastodon account on mastodon.social or most other instances through the web like any other website. It's no more difficult than a Reddit account.
1) Neither I nor most non-techies have a clue what an "instance" is.
2) Reddit banned me years ago for no reason I could think of.
2) yes the people who own servers get to decide what happens on them. That isn't a feature (or bug) of the fediverse its just the way networks work. But if you don't want to join an instance you can get one hosted on a service like masto.host (the one I use) for very little.
For technical people these things should be non starters as well. It is a group of people who should be acutely aware of everything wrong with social media, and many are not.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre
From: Benjamin Behnke <ben@viermal.be> Date: June 17, 2026 at 12:32:25 PM EDT To: josephstirt@gmail.com Subject: Re: I am submitting my blog for your consideration: https://bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for reaching out. Your post frequency is too high to be listed on Bubbles. You are publishing 3 articles per day. To quote from the criteria listed in the FAQ: Moderate pace. Not more than one or two posts per day on average. Bubbles is for writers, not content machines. I hope you'll understand. Let me know if you plan to slow down :)
Cheers, Ben
If you don't like it, adjust it for yourself with an extension or script.
with this-window default (or actually, the browser-default-default), I can middle click and it'll open in a new tab regardless
pretty funny to have this discussion though, takes me back to the HTML4 and XHTML days
I don't agree. If your design choice forces a user flow that is surprising, awkward, and redundant then it's definitely the wrong choice. It's still a call to be made by the design team, though.
Or just configure your browser to ignore the target param, eg browser.link.open_newwindow_restriction 0 in about:config
The fact I've gotten so many down votes for my previous comment really nails the point down how HN isn't really used by technical people anymore. It's mostly idiots with opinions.
The idiots here are arguing to follow default, de-facto specifications and to give users an easy accessible choice.
CTRL+left click is ingrained in me now anyway.
https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/new-tab
That is a valid option for detachable UI elements seen in desktop apps.
Opening links in a separate tab or window is not that thought. That is a first class user flow in web design.
Good ol' _____-clicking saves the day again!
i took ___ to mean the option key which has this symbol made up of lines: "⌥", it is also the key most likely to be used for such a feature, so i figured that's what you must be talking about.
if you weren't then the key most certainly doesn't exist on a mac either, and i apologize for the downvote. unfortunately it appears that i can't undo it anymore so i hope someone else will compensate with an upvote.
Sol Roth Annex HN
So when you say "Nope!", you're being downvoted because you're implicitly saying "actually users don't deserve choice".
I guess it depends on a persons web workflow though
https://bubbles.town/briefing
If anything, I would recommend a word count instead.
Word count is objective. Read time is subjective, variable, just an estimate, and probably based on word count anyway.
https://hckrnews.com
for a slightly different take on the concept
EDIT: ...just realized that's in the FAQ.
> Is it open source?
> Not yet. Maybe someday.
Is that something you're frequently accused of, or why the "disclaimer"?
A second corollary: When a social site's top content stops being about the internet, then it is probably going to be even more successful.
On first glance, the first several posts are more interesting than HN; that’s a good sign. But there’s no hide link to mask the AI posts I don’t care about; perhaps one appears after signup?
But. HN’s single-post mute method is treading water at best versus the flood, and with the sixth post on the homepage being outsourced-to-AI, clearly that will persist at Bubbles. Can I mute specific blogs that are just repeatedly posting ‘I subcontracted my project to AI and am now taking credit as if I did the work myself’ on this site? If so, I’d give this a full week tryout immediately.
Indulging in meta-commentary: The HN submit history for bubbles.town is interesting. Took 7 tries to reach the front page. The final viral title resembles the supposed-LLM-tell "X not Y." Coincidence or evidence that the models touch on a useful way to communicate ideas. (I only looked because I submitted the one 2 weeks ago.)
The prose on https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/its-not-just-data-its-pos... changed how I think about it: the framework is useful for reasoning, not lazy writing. This bubbles.town submission's title could be light evidence of negative parallelism's utility. (Or, more likely, just the stochastic nature of what's popular when)
What's your tech stack? Mine is pretty vanilla ruby on rails, while my site is closed source, I did open source a rails engine for adaptive monitoring of RSS feeds that does a lot of the heavy lifting: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
It would be interesting to extract devices and inventions from articles to create an "inventions race" (as opposed to "arms race.") It could be used to establish prior-art and negate a lot of expensive and unnecessary patents that end up going nowhere or used for trolling. That's something I have been thinking about for tinkeri.ng. Something comparable to a patent archive - but used for networking and sharing. Would end up looking like a wiki with articles getting pingbacks.
Interesting idea overall. Could be generalized to just general trend identification I think based on named entity recognition (like google trends). Over time you can trace first mentions of stuff and buzz over time. I’ll noodle on it.
Also, looks like ArticlesBase stopped in 2024 - maybe offer a way for users to upload articles, summarize them and then people can micropay to read? Maybe just charge for older articles? Can also charge for extra long articles? Put everything into an LLM?
I also want to add content digests/newsletters that highlights best content of the week for sharing on twitter and via email to those who register accounts. Typical growth marketing stuff
Regarding Wordpress, I've found it still lacks a decent search plugin. Could you make one? Charge for it, accept outside pings, take in full feeds and provide a search box in return for subsequent display on individual sites.
Also, pitch your aggregator as well as something that'll "pull in more engaged readers into your site." Perhaps the search box could be "search this site only" / "search all engineered blogs."
You could also make the plugin free, but charge for accepting more than 10(?) pings per month. If you create a specialized LLM, you could also offer some type of shared ownership too to encourage cooperation.
Crowdsourcing content is another interesting area to watch where writers propose an article and it gets funded beforehand. Those articles could end up being open-source ideas with actionable information. Having built up a reputation and readership would make successful crowdfunding more likely.
That line is so claude.
Rap Dash is great too in case you're into rap: https://rapdash.com/
No thanks, I don't need any extra stress in my life.
A better title would be "Hacker News but for general content from independent blogs."
Hacker News but for independent blogs would be the same topic as HN but only stuff from independent blogs.
This is avowedly broad: "Hacker News and Lobste.rs have community voting figured out, but non-tech content gets drowned by the tech majority"
https://bubbles.town/about
Also, how do you vet your blogs?
14/30 of the posts on the top page are just about making websites
You'll see similar results from the various indieweb indexes that primarily use the kagi RSS list from github; this list attracts a specific segment of the blogosphere.
Top does not sort? Also "top" is what exactly? All time? Today?
How do you defend against brigading?
1. https://sidebar.io
Obligatory mention of Minifeed, a curated directory, reader and search engine for personal blogs: https://minifeed.net/
I’ve been running it for a few years now. You can build a personal feed, follow others, see related blogs and posts, and use full-text search across all blogs.
Feel free to submit your own or someone else’s blog here: https://minifeed.net/suggest
>Read top link
>It's some garbage about white supremacy
>Read second link
>It's a Hacker News story about Linux
>Same for the next three links
>Read sixth link
>More garbage about white supremacy and how Trump bad
>Close site and don't bother to remember its name
This isn't normal and this isn't how the Internet used to be
> looks inside
> american politics and culture war
I guess my choice is Hacker News with its AI obsession, or just abandoning the internet. There is no escaping the shit that has infected the rest of social media
I call it bubblewire. Funny. I had no prior knowledge of bubbles.town until seeing it here now.
bubbles.town looks nice! Hope to see more projects that aim to bring back the good old web.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552985
One reason for it not resonating might be that it’s yet another opaque algorithmic feed in a moment in time where people are getting sick and tired of them and wary of their manipulative features. And HN is so inundated with AI submissions that having yet another Show HN about it is uninteresting to many.
Would you visit HN if it were just a link aggregator whose ranking was decided by hidden logic of a machine? A lot of people wouldn’t. We’re a social species, there is value in human curation—especially when driven by the community—that’s inherently lacking from algorithmic curation (AI or otherwise).
It's an experiment made for the web of 2026, where you can no longer tell if the users are humans or bots.
If nobody's interested in that idea, I accept that.
I assumed it was...?
If not, who or what decides the ranking moment-by-moment? dang?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
I'd have upvoted you but I think you got eaten by /new.
https://www.youtube.com/c/ISHITANIFURNITURE https://www.youtube.com/@Knobs https://www.youtube.com/@kiwami-japan https://www.youtube.com/@NileRed/videos https://www.youtube.com/@GirlWithTheDogs/videos https://www.youtube.com/@bernadettebanner/videos https://www.youtube.com/@shootimpro https://www.youtube.com/@DrMattRegan https://www.youtube.com/@clabretro https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections https://www.youtube.com/@BrickTechnology https://www.youtube.com/@kellyeld2323
> Documentaries featuring stories from the history of math and science
https://www.youtube.com/@bensyversen
Integza is no longer small, but still good, home built rocket engines
https://www.youtube.com/@integza
edit: formatting
https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCrafsMan
Some Machining related channels on youtube:
this old tony, Chronova engineering, cylo's garage, inheritance machining, breaking taps, blondie hacks, tarkka, dan gelbert, Jonesey Makes, Eric(with a K), Clough42, Alec steele, NBR Works, Not An engineer, Stefan Gotteswinter, oxtoolco, ROBRENZ, MrCrispin, Clickspring, Artisan Makes, MH Anything, Jellyfish machine,Maker B,
And also there is great course on precision engineering by Alex slocum
"the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle"
Close... guess I will stick to HN
The beginning of the end of the free and open internet was the rise of the walled garden. The final nail in the coffin is that every search result for "independent blogs" and "free and open internet" these days goes to politically challenged morons like this.
Simply put, the people running their own websites and blogs aren't "normal" anymore. The "normal" people are on the big platforms, unfortunately.
Ok. I think I'm good without this.
Good luck with the convention if you decide to go!
A few lines from that "the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle" frontpage articles (that title, already):
> I cannot help but see that “Pinterest clean girl fitness and fruit bowl gua sha yoga mat pilates in the forest” content as covert white supremacy and eugenicist ideals
Let people live ffs!
> it’s always white or racially ambiguous people,
"Racially ambiuous"? For a start it's an attempt at manipulating thought by manipulating speech. Then it's deeply racist: it's wanting to categorize people by race, to hate on them. In this case putting, for example, latino-whites (I'm not saying it, TFA is) or half-asian/half-white (like my nephew) as "white" to hate on whites. It has a name:
racism.
Anti-white racism, but racism (usually double-down by explaining that it's impossible to be racists towards whites for anti-white racism is impossible).
And at the gym and among my friends, I see a lot of these "yoga girls" are with... asian genes. Same online among the fitness "influencers" with many subscribers.
There are also a huge lot of incredibly muscular and fit... Blacks. What a surprise: blacks ain't white.
How can someone be filled with so much hate (including, potentially, hate for its own race) to write such hateful texts?
Despicable author, writing hateful words, to please people with really dark hearts.
That's at least interesting, in an old-school-internet kind of way. Hopefully it doesn't get captured by one clique or another.
Given that it's the most-voted post, it looks like it already happened.
Her point isn't that "fitness is white supremacy," and not even remotely close. Just that the social media and culture around wellness and fitness can give off white supremacist, fascist energy by presenting an extremely unobtainable and yet highly idealized state of being, where everyone is very thin and white and fits within the stereotypes of the gender assigned to them, which is not remotely how the world at large can be.
Actually, reading it again, I don't see the author calling out anyone in particular, just noting that the culture around a thing they otherwise enjoy makes them uncomfortable, and why.
Your comment made me actually go click through to see who wrote it, as I was curious… a white girl from Germany. It seems very possible that her algorithm is feeding her mostly white European fitness influencers, because she herself is a white European girl. That isn’t inherently wrong and there is no supremacy at play.