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.
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.
CTRL+left click is ingrained in me now anyway.
Good ol' _____-clicking saves the day again!
*Link: https://bubbles.town/rss
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.
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!
EDIT: ...just realized that's in the FAQ.
> Is it open source?
> Not yet. Maybe someday.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
No thanks, I don't need any extra stress in my life.
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.
Ok. I think I'm good without this.
> $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://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-521a-representing-...
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.
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 blogsThe 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)
Top does not sort? Also "top" is what exactly? All time? Today?
How do you defend against brigading?
"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.
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.
That line is so claude.
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"
Rap Dash is great too in case you're into rap: https://rapdash.com/
Also, how do you vet your blogs?
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
> 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
>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