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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.
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.
> 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.
This reminds me of Kagi's Small Web: https://kagi.com/smallweb/ or https://kagi.com/smallweb/river
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.
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?
*Link: https://bubbles.town/rss
I haven't tried but in principle you only need a Mastodon compatible authentication, there are other services that are not twitter clones. See for example https://fedi.tips/what-other-kinds-of-servers-are-on-the-fed... or more complete https://fediverse.observer/allsoftwares
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.
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.
I'm curios why you are avoiding social media?
+1 to this. Apple sign-in would be ideal, since it maps to single-identity more cleanly than a social media system.
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.
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.
Very exciting! And I like the fediverse integration too.
> $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".
The Briefings have been most useful for me. It feels more curated and less firehose-y.
Bubbles dev here, thanks for the mention
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.
It would be great if this supported federation as a Lemmy community, given that Lemmy already has votes.
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 blogsNice 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
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.
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.
Oh, great, I can log in with my GoToSocial instance to comment and vote! I will definitely add this site alongside my HN addiction :)
> "5011 independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you."
That line is so claude.
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.
Love these niche experiments.
Rap Dash is great too in case you're into rap: https://rapdash.com/
It's not stated explicitly, but I would assume that 'independent' blog means no Substack, no Medium, etc? Is that the case?
This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I've been feeling like HN feels more and more repetitive.
Can you pipe those posts to an IRC channel?
This is it!! I can finally leave reading comments on hn or get bamboozeled by ai posts masquerading as something technical
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"
Curious on your "Top" algorithm? I see many 1-voted items there.
Also, how do you vet your blogs?
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
Please make AI a category.
Just curious but isn't this just digg, metafilter?
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?
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...
Nice. Glad these kinds of projects exist.
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
Search doesn’t seem to work.
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.
>Click
>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
I like it, but shouldn't this be part of "Show HN"?
This is lovely
> 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
I love it!
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.
nice
Some of these submissions would put satirists out of a job.