This is a very nice project! Thank you for creating it and sharing it here on HN. I like the minimal version more but the modern version is quite nice too. I would probably stick to the minimal version but since it seems to lack the search feature I end up using the modern version for that.
By the way, some minor issues I found:
1. In the minimal version, when browsing the list of blogs I cannot get past page 12. The last page the UI lets me navigate to is https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-12 which shows blogs up to names starting with 'M'. I can reach page 13 by manually editing the URL to https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-13 which shows two blogs starting with 'N'. However, pages 14 and beyond just load the home page. Surely there are more blogs with names starting with 'O', 'P', etc.?
2. The modern version at https://blogosphere.app/ uses infinite scroll, which makes it impossible to reach the footer. Each time I scroll down, more content loads and pushes the footer further away. I was only able to view the footer by modifying the DOM in the browser's developer tools. It would be nice if there were a straightforward way to access the footer.
Thank you for the detailed feedback. I'm glad you like this project.
1. Yeah, there are definitely more blogs. Seems like an issue paginating and fetching it at build time. I will check this.
2. I generally don't prefer infinite scroll but since people are used to it on social media, I kept it on the modern version. It does make it impossible to see the footer. I will figure out a way around this. In the meantime, the "Submit" page should display the footer.
I'm also going to add search to the minimal version since I also prefer it over the modern version and search is useful.
Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this, both of which I remember well. That's not a criticism! I guess that the quality-drop in search wasn't quite enough to make it happen, but the advent of AI content predomination will be.
> Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this
One of these hand-curated blog aggregator websites pops up on HN about every month. They're cool and good on the author for trying to solve the problem, but it seems like the wrong approach to me. They're too disorganized, a random collection of mostly tech- and politics-related writing from random people with zero way to vet the quality of the writing. They also require the creator/owner to care about the project for the long-term, which is unlikely. I never revisit the aggregators.
I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Maybe a clever person could come up with some kind of higher-tech version that could present a more interesting & consistent interface to users, encourage blogs to link back to each other, and also solve the dead-link problem.
I think we're going to reinvent Google's "circles" mechanism from G+. We all (well, the terminally online, at least) are going to be part of several more or less overlapping villages, and the people in those villages are going to trust each other to not be bad faith actors. Everything else... everything that tries to scale... everything public... wasteland.
Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.
Interesting. Each time I think about how we could reboot the (social) web I have this on mind. I don't want exposure to everything, so kind of whitelisting the contacts/peoples/blogs is the first thought.
I guess it could work to carve your own cozy echo chamber that once in a while lets something new in.
The conflict I cannot penetrate is that some things (could) need a larger exposure surface. I.e. OS projects, maintainers that will naturally generate a large following. There are also individuals that want to maximize exposure, mostly for the sake of it. The latter could be neglected but the former not. That leaves an natural backdoor to turn any networking into the same cesspools we have right now.
I am not sure, maybe we have to subdue to the fact that a massive focus on a single thing will turn out into something bad. Considering the importance of Linus Torvalds to the software world, it can even work. He isn't really digitally socialized in a "modern" sense and he still is networked enough to manage an high impact project. Sure he is networked via the linux ecosystem, but that walls him away from direct interactions with the general public.
Instead of having that one god-author who has to keep maintaining everything, I think a better option may be to have the whole comprehensively community-maintained. Which opens up the question: How do you open source structured data and maintenance?
> The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
That has both caught on, is well-supported by WordPress and lots of other tools since forever, and is notable enough that there's a glossary entry for it on Wikipedia:
I like the idea of tree curation. People view the branch of their interest. Anyone can submit anything to any point but are unlikely to be noticed if they submit closer to the trunk. Curated lists submit their lists to curators closer to the trunk.
The furthest branches have the least volume (need filters to stop bulk submission to all levels, but still allow some multi submission). It allows curators to contribute in a small field. They then submit their preferred items to the next level up. If that curator likes it they send it further. A leaf level curator can bypass any curator above but with the same risk of being ignored if the higher level node receives too much volume.
You could even run fully AI branches where their picks would only make all the way up by convincing a human curator somewhere above them of the quality. If they don't do a good job they would just be ignored. People can listen to them direct if they are so inclined
I feel like every new iteration of ways to find good content online: webrings, blogrolls, user upvoting/downvoting, giving everyone their own microblog to share interesting links, ML to learn your own preferences by your behavior - they all worked really well at first, but then eroded significantly once people figured out how to game them.
The economic incentive is overwhelming to corrupt these signals, either directly (link sharing schemes, upvote rings, bots to like your content) or indirectly (shaping your content itself to have the shape of what will be promoted, regardless of its quality).
What you almost want is to use any of these ideas and hope for it to catch on widely enough in your small niche to be useful, but not so much that it comes an optimization target.
Smolnet might be the answer. There really isn't a feasible mechanism for monetizing it. At worst, you could have some text ad embedded. No images. Minimal semantic markup (links, lists, quotes, code, generic text) in the case of gemini/gemtext.
I think a web ring combined with some kind of web of trust style system would be nice. Ideally they could be both centralized where an initial creator holds the keys to what's allowed and decentralized where it just sort of exists. I haven't quite been able to sketch out a reasonable way to keep sites persistent and consistent except DNS records, though. DNS of course making it hard or impossible for smaller and less tech-savvy creators while also having it's own issues regardless.
I'm a big web ring person though so I might be biased and trying to use a hammer in place of a screwdriver.
Aggregate the aggregators, then add a search box and ranking algorithm. You’ll have something like early-internet search, because these blogs are reminiscent of the early internet, and higher signal-noise (even if you think it’s still low, at least there’s less obvious marketing).
> people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Imho this is better at the blog post level of granularity. Sometimes I will like someone's writing style, much more often I will be interested in topical recommended reading.
Couldn't you technically crawl all these blogs for their "blog's I'm reading" and create a social graph? You could start vetting based on how often other blogs link to that one, sort of like an impact factor in research.
Thanks to a post here a week or two ago, I started looking at Gemini and the Smolnet in general. It looks really appealing to me. No layout. Just the data and accompanying meta semantics (this is a list item, this is a quote, etc.). There's even a Geocities-like hosting service that is completely free and without ads, and it provides a Gemtext -> HTML conversion for people accessing via HTTP instead of gemini:
It's a good question, and I think worth trying to answer. I think the key thing is that discovery is derived from a curated index rather than social link posting and voting, and the darwinian race to the bottom/popularity/campaigning that drives link aggregators is replaced by a more deliberate human curation with all of its good and bad. You find new things, you feel a slower pace, but maybe get bored more frequently too.
> I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
I have been doing this by linking my linkhut profile with either my profile picture (I used to) or just mentioning it in comments like I am doing right now
https://ln.ht/~imafh , Although not really entirely to blogs, I have this place to recommend cool musicians,projects,links that I have found and I write a short note in all of them as to why I really liked the link. But with tags you can especially have a #blog #webring and use linkhut with notes feature
What do you think about linkhut, I had submitted it to hackernews as a submission after finding it but there wasn't really much traction to it, I am not going to lie when I say this when this feature really resonated with me so much.
I hope more people come to know about linkhut, I hope I am doing my part in making people know about it :)
I have submitted it again after reading your comment. I definitely feel like certain discussions can happen on linkhut side which will be both interesting to read/write on.
We're heading to a future where (when) friction is a luxury. Anyways, I thank the organizers for the rare opportunity. Long live Blogosphere.app, long live blogs.
Similarly, I feel like book publishers are about to become a thriving business soon again. With any book being most likely just a bot creation, trusting "Random House" sounds like a thing more of us will start paying attention to to make sure we're buying a human made thing.
There was some overlap between the webring age and the early search age, but once search became entrenched and useful, webrings faded. Blogrolls survived for a little bit longer, but it was search.
Specifically, once search became the way you found the first page/site to begin with. Before search as default, you found sites in a bunch of scattershot ways: advertisements, word of mouth, lists in books, or lists on websites that updated periodically (that you had to have found/heard about one of the other ways) for example. Then you crawled out from there because that was the only way to find things. You had to either know the URL or use a link. And not all of the links/sites in the webrings were good.
Once search got good enough, people found the initial site via search and instead of taking their time clicking through a webring which might at any point lead them somewhere dead or useless, it was quicker to go back to the search page to find something else.
Page access went from being a chained together web of back and forth links to a 2 step process of search -> page.
I follow awesome lists. These are curated lists of software. It reverts google indexing, because search is awful.
About personal blogs... I have many many personal blogs in my repository. Around 4k. Respository below. The real problem is to find quality stuff.
You can have millions of them, but if they are not worth my time, then what is the point?
I cannot verify and decide what is good manually.
Obviously.
I think we cannot also rely on Google to provide rating, nor any corporation.
So I have my own ratings, because at least I will be able to find what I found worth before.
Love this! I very much appreciate the inclusion of a lightweight version, as I think lightweight discovery for blogs and the small web is where good tools and apps are needed.
Also, given that the lightweight version is very hn styled format it naturally leads my brain to imagining a version with upvotes and commenters (which may be a good or a bad thing) but with the link submission part automated. Not necessarily the intent here but it was the first time that particular combination of possibilities occurred to me as a way to do things.
Also curious about how these blogs are indexed/reviewed. Is the list ever pruned over time due to inactivity?
Thank you. The initial list was from blogroll.org (mentioned in the about page, and I emailed the person who built that). From then on, I review every submission that happens via the form.
The scheduler flags blogs that fail and doesn't try to fetch after a few tries. I'm still working on an effective way to re-review and prune. Open to any feedback.
I'd say a periodic job that looks at the last update of all your blogs, and removes those that haven't updated in over a year would be generally agreeable.
If you want to be exceptionally kind, you can also email the submitter and tell them their blog has been removed due to inactivity, so they'll remember to submit if they start blogging again.
I suppose my dream would be that the protocolization of this from back in the day gets revived in some way. Like a google pagecrawl style index built up from blogrolls (though I don't know if the blogroll itself was ever literally protocol-ized), combined with some checking of RSS feeds for activity. Or webrings, or something else.
Though in some respects these are less smart than what you're already doing, but I would like to think there's an elegant way to make an index emerge organically to minimize the editorial burden of any one person.
I always thought the "planets"[1][2][3] were a neat idea. I wish there were more of them for dedicated topics. Then I can just subscribe to specific planets which pulls curated feeds from various blogs on that topic.
Vaguely related, I did an extremely basic RSS feed combiner ages ago: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ when there was that one post where people could share their blogs and many of those had RSS feeds.
That said, it got its list of feeds from the repo that someone made which hasn't been updated in a few years, so even if new blog content gets pulled, the list of blogs doesn't change. Oh well, wasn't a super serious project.
It aggregates the top articles on STEAMD topics (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math, and Design) from various forums and displays them in chronological order.
This includes forums like Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, Slashdot, Bear, and some science, tech & programming related subreddits.
This is awesome. I find myself seeking out blogs nowadays as many of the best forums have died out and reddit has dropped in quality significantly.
I typically use marginalia and wiby to make finding posts from blogs easier, but I like the idea of providing hn style mechanics to blog posts, so many of which lack the ability to comment/discuss the material. At the same time, while I think this is a useful tool, I am a little weary of the aggregation and consolidation of the web.
This is great, thanks! It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing. I'm always up for that, and plan on spending plenty of time exploring the list.
>It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing
I don't know that I've heard a better description of the thing the so-called small web is about than that. It's the clearest answer to the "why" of having a small web of discoverable personal blogs and sites.
I've come to the conclusion that Hacker News is the best aggregator out there. Substack knows my interests yet gives terrible recommendations. Youtube constantly recommends the same videos or exaggerates my interest in a topic based on a few views, spamming me with related content until I watch something unrelated. The only downside of Hacker News is that its focus is narrower than other sites. But perhaps because the focus is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" there is a bias towards things I find interesting with less noise than more commercial offerings.
Very clean site, well done. I’ve built something similar, but it also has an algorithmic front page option as well based on the “standard” algorithm from Reddit/HN: https://engineered.at
I also have it wired up to gpt nano for topic extraction and summary creation per post, if you register for an account (free) you can also follow sources and topics to fine tune things.
I have a big list of features to continue adding to it, like an ability to “claim” your site so you can get some analytics from the site, and potentially to boost your site in the algorithm. Might also add a jobs board.
This is great. But I’ve bookmarked at least 10 of these aggregators over the years, and I never revisit any of them. Partly because I don’t have the time to browse and discover new content.
I also don’t read the blog spam from prolific writers who pop up here every two days, especially the low-quality ones constantly yapping about AI. So the number of blogs I revisit is a handful, and I have a page on my site listing them [1]. Some of the blogs I’ve listed also have backlinks to my site. It’s super simple and works fairly well for me. Plus there’s rss.
Could you add a form submission button next to the filter, so that it doesn't require JavaScript? (Or actually that can probably be done easily enough with some kind of CSS variable-setting trick...?)
Very cool! Love the minimal design a lot, unsurprisingly.
My Minifeed [1] started with a similar goal of having a "HN for blogs", but then it grew to include search, related recommendations, custom feeds, lists, etc. I don't have categories though.
Amazing that the minimal version works in Dillo, except for the categories menu which uses JS (using a form and submit button inside a noscript tag would work as a fallback).
Great feedback. I will add search to this minimal version. The non-minimal version comes with search. Filter by language is something neither has and will be a great addition.
Bubbles is different, because the front page is created by real people voting. It also supports comments, blogs in EN and DE, as well as following blogs.
How do you curate the blogs that are being added to this? I see that there's a way to submit your own blog, but was there a list you started with initially? Thanks for making this!
Very nice, this is great! Love that you give the two UX options.
FYI (bug report): In the non-minimal version, navigating by category is janky in FireFox. The logo briefly disappears with the nav jumping up in its place every time you click a category.
It's refreshing to to see something intentionally uncurated.
I think "low quality" content has it's place. A lot of my favourite blogs back in the day could be considered "low quality", but for whatever reason I liked them and read their stuff... Same was true of my own blog. It wasn't particularly high quality but back then even a lowish quality blog would still occasionally be surfaced on Google if the right key words were searched for.
I miss this about modern YouTube too... I used to love watching content from small creators even if their content was "lower quality", but it's so hard to discover that type of content today.
Everywhere you go there is an algorithm pushing you towards larger and more professional creators. And that can be fine, but it's nice to have some balance.
"quality" is something you care about if you want to virtue signal your professional or intellectual capability, usually as part of a monetization scheme. Hacker News cares so much about quality because this forum is attached to a billion dollar startup incubator, and for many people here their persona is business. Posting on substack is business for most people. Posting on medium is business for most people. "Quality" is just another kind of influencer culture.
Writing blogs shouldn't be about marketing and reading blogs shouldn't be about maximizing information density. The vast vast majority of blogs on the old web that everyone yearns to return to weren't "high quality." You were just writing about whatever, likely in a style that would get you downvoted on HN for being insufficiently substantive, and if you were lucky someone else might read it.
I wouldn't even call it "low quality" so much as "non-commercial."
i can't describe how happy this project makes me feel. Honestly, i don't even know why. I mean, the idea is great but it's nothing "extra", still it just feels right. Like breath of fresh air.
Fixed header isn't always a good thing, it can also be a mistake. Since content is the product, let the content take up all available space and use your browser navigation capabilities to navigate if necessary
Great work, I haven't updated my public site in years while I waited for the LLM stuff to play out, but you've inspired me to put it back out there and submit.
That's great. I wish we could convince more people to use similar tools regularly, myself included.
It may not 'scale' as well as algorithmic feeds, but maybe that's what will save the Web. We need more sweat and passion, both in curation of content and in the effort to find it.
Question, is this strictly chronological, or is there anything at all to make this an "algorithmic feed" like HN, reddit, twitter, or facebook? (list is roughly in the order of less shitty to more shitty, but note that none of them are chronological, unlike, say, a RSS reader aggregating some set of blogs)
Appreciate it :) I don't have one. This is hosted on Cloudflare as a static site and a cron that runs on a $5 VM (that also hosts other things). So it doesn't cost me much to keep it alive other than the domain cost. I built it this way intentionally so that I can keep this running forever.
Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!
Thank you. I wanted to mostly stay away from algorithmic feed to stay true to RSS. On the non-minimal version of the site, you can sign up and follow blogs to have a "For You" tab, but it's still recent posts from blogs you follow.
"A woman had sex with identical twins and now it's impossible to tell who is the father", is this a blog post or news or sarcastic news or what the hell
If you're referring to comments on the website, I plan to keep it minimal (the text version is a static site).
If you're referring to comments on blogs in general, I have many thoughts. Back in the day, comments used to be how you connected with people and let other people find you. It also came with spam (spam plugins could only do so much).
With the rise of static site generators, most people don't have comments on their blogs now. It is something I miss though.
I haven’t had comments on my blog for over a decade now and I don’t miss them. For every useful and informative comment I got several spammy or rude reply. Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media.
I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.
I've had comments (open, anonymous, no screening) on my blog since it started in 2004. Back in the day when it was very popular, most of my blog posts were the result of reader tips/advice/heads-up/etc. I have to work MUCH harder now that comments have pretty much dried up.
Yes, unfortunately spam and rude replies come with comments. I also don't have comments on my blog. I instead have one of those email masking services that allows to people to email me (and I have found this effective).
Thank you. I approved your blog. Quick note: It looks like your feed items don't have published date which makes it hard to store and sort recent posts.
I just hope if you can add dark-mode, I use hackernews essential which adds dark mode and more features which I really like in hackernews, Perhaps something like this can be added but overall I really like it!
You have (essentially) just made something which I imagined 2 years ago:
My point, which has only grown to an even larger degree is that Hackernews has too many AI discussions, which both feels a bit fomo to me and also I am seeing AI generated blog posts and comments now on Hackernews as well.
At some point, I want a website where I can talk about the more human aspects, some occasional AI mention is fine but not if a quarter or half of front page is hackernews and some genuinely nice projects don't get the attention :(
I had joined hackernews to read those content pieces and fell in love with the human discussion aspect but now there are definitely moments of browsing hackernews which makes me feel as to what I had written in the ask HN
my last line within the ask HN was: I just want people who don't want the latest ai hype to gather around and discuss some other cool things which are "not" AI. This kind of fits into that
Adding my submissions of blog-posts into it in sometime :) See you there!
Funny timing — I tried to submit my own Show HN today for a small Linux app I've been building and got blocked because my account is too new. Spent the afternoon reading through HN threads to build up some karma instead. Feels like the indie software equivalent of the same problem this project is trying to solve — it's getting harder for small, genuine projects to find an audience without gaming some system first. Appreciate what you've built here!
This is a very nice project! Thank you for creating it and sharing it here on HN. I like the minimal version more but the modern version is quite nice too. I would probably stick to the minimal version but since it seems to lack the search feature I end up using the modern version for that.
By the way, some minor issues I found:
1. In the minimal version, when browsing the list of blogs I cannot get past page 12. The last page the UI lets me navigate to is https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-12 which shows blogs up to names starting with 'M'. I can reach page 13 by manually editing the URL to https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-13 which shows two blogs starting with 'N'. However, pages 14 and beyond just load the home page. Surely there are more blogs with names starting with 'O', 'P', etc.?
2. The modern version at https://blogosphere.app/ uses infinite scroll, which makes it impossible to reach the footer. Each time I scroll down, more content loads and pushes the footer further away. I was only able to view the footer by modifying the DOM in the browser's developer tools. It would be nice if there were a straightforward way to access the footer.
Thank you for the detailed feedback. I'm glad you like this project.
1. Yeah, there are definitely more blogs. Seems like an issue paginating and fetching it at build time. I will check this. 2. I generally don't prefer infinite scroll but since people are used to it on social media, I kept it on the modern version. It does make it impossible to see the footer. I will figure out a way around this. In the meantime, the "Submit" page should display the footer.
I'm also going to add search to the minimal version since I also prefer it over the modern version and search is useful.
Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this, both of which I remember well. That's not a criticism! I guess that the quality-drop in search wasn't quite enough to make it happen, but the advent of AI content predomination will be.
> Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this
One of these hand-curated blog aggregator websites pops up on HN about every month. They're cool and good on the author for trying to solve the problem, but it seems like the wrong approach to me. They're too disorganized, a random collection of mostly tech- and politics-related writing from random people with zero way to vet the quality of the writing. They also require the creator/owner to care about the project for the long-term, which is unlikely. I never revisit the aggregators.
I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Maybe a clever person could come up with some kind of higher-tech version that could present a more interesting & consistent interface to users, encourage blogs to link back to each other, and also solve the dead-link problem.
I think we're going to reinvent Google's "circles" mechanism from G+. We all (well, the terminally online, at least) are going to be part of several more or less overlapping villages, and the people in those villages are going to trust each other to not be bad faith actors. Everything else... everything that tries to scale... everything public... wasteland.
Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.
Interesting. Each time I think about how we could reboot the (social) web I have this on mind. I don't want exposure to everything, so kind of whitelisting the contacts/peoples/blogs is the first thought. I guess it could work to carve your own cozy echo chamber that once in a while lets something new in. The conflict I cannot penetrate is that some things (could) need a larger exposure surface. I.e. OS projects, maintainers that will naturally generate a large following. There are also individuals that want to maximize exposure, mostly for the sake of it. The latter could be neglected but the former not. That leaves an natural backdoor to turn any networking into the same cesspools we have right now.
I am not sure, maybe we have to subdue to the fact that a massive focus on a single thing will turn out into something bad. Considering the importance of Linus Torvalds to the software world, it can even work. He isn't really digitally socialized in a "modern" sense and he still is networked enough to manage an high impact project. Sure he is networked via the linux ecosystem, but that walls him away from direct interactions with the general public.
Instead of having that one god-author who has to keep maintaining everything, I think a better option may be to have the whole comprehensively community-maintained. Which opens up the question: How do you open source structured data and maintenance?
I know people don’t like to hear this, but blockchains are great for publishing an append only public log that gets widely replicated.
> The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
That has both caught on, is well-supported by WordPress and lots of other tools since forever, and is notable enough that there's a glossary entry for it on Wikipedia:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogroll>
It's partly why OPML exists.
I like the idea of tree curation. People view the branch of their interest. Anyone can submit anything to any point but are unlikely to be noticed if they submit closer to the trunk. Curated lists submit their lists to curators closer to the trunk.
The furthest branches have the least volume (need filters to stop bulk submission to all levels, but still allow some multi submission). It allows curators to contribute in a small field. They then submit their preferred items to the next level up. If that curator likes it they send it further. A leaf level curator can bypass any curator above but with the same risk of being ignored if the higher level node receives too much volume.
You could even run fully AI branches where their picks would only make all the way up by convincing a human curator somewhere above them of the quality. If they don't do a good job they would just be ignored. People can listen to them direct if they are so inclined
I feel like every new iteration of ways to find good content online: webrings, blogrolls, user upvoting/downvoting, giving everyone their own microblog to share interesting links, ML to learn your own preferences by your behavior - they all worked really well at first, but then eroded significantly once people figured out how to game them.
The economic incentive is overwhelming to corrupt these signals, either directly (link sharing schemes, upvote rings, bots to like your content) or indirectly (shaping your content itself to have the shape of what will be promoted, regardless of its quality).
What you almost want is to use any of these ideas and hope for it to catch on widely enough in your small niche to be useful, but not so much that it comes an optimization target.
Smolnet might be the answer. There really isn't a feasible mechanism for monetizing it. At worst, you could have some text ad embedded. No images. Minimal semantic markup (links, lists, quotes, code, generic text) in the case of gemini/gemtext.
> The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like
I think OpenRing does that? [1]. Not my blog, just linking for illustration, but you can see how it looks here at the bottom of the page: https://drewdevault.com/2020/02/06/Dependencies-and-maintain...
[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
I think a web ring combined with some kind of web of trust style system would be nice. Ideally they could be both centralized where an initial creator holds the keys to what's allowed and decentralized where it just sort of exists. I haven't quite been able to sketch out a reasonable way to keep sites persistent and consistent except DNS records, though. DNS of course making it hard or impossible for smaller and less tech-savvy creators while also having it's own issues regardless.
I'm a big web ring person though so I might be biased and trying to use a hammer in place of a screwdriver.
Aggregate the aggregators, then add a search box and ranking algorithm. You’ll have something like early-internet search, because these blogs are reminiscent of the early internet, and higher signal-noise (even if you think it’s still low, at least there’s less obvious marketing).
> people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Imho this is better at the blog post level of granularity. Sometimes I will like someone's writing style, much more often I will be interested in topical recommended reading.
Couldn't you technically crawl all these blogs for their "blog's I'm reading" and create a social graph? You could start vetting based on how often other blogs link to that one, sort of like an impact factor in research.
I think Marginalia does bidirectional link analysis if that helps.
That sounds like PageRank, Google’s original algorithm.
Thanks to a post here a week or two ago, I started looking at Gemini and the Smolnet in general. It looks really appealing to me. No layout. Just the data and accompanying meta semantics (this is a list item, this is a quote, etc.). There's even a Geocities-like hosting service that is completely free and without ads, and it provides a Gemtext -> HTML conversion for people accessing via HTTP instead of gemini:
I'm honestly not sure what these do that federated link aggregators like lemmy/mbin/piefed don't already do.
It's a good question, and I think worth trying to answer. I think the key thing is that discovery is derived from a curated index rather than social link posting and voting, and the darwinian race to the bottom/popularity/campaigning that drives link aggregators is replaced by a more deliberate human curation with all of its good and bad. You find new things, you feel a slower pace, but maybe get bored more frequently too.
> I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
I have been doing this by linking my linkhut profile with either my profile picture (I used to) or just mentioning it in comments like I am doing right now
https://ln.ht/~imafh , Although not really entirely to blogs, I have this place to recommend cool musicians,projects,links that I have found and I write a short note in all of them as to why I really liked the link. But with tags you can especially have a #blog #webring and use linkhut with notes feature
What do you think about linkhut, I had submitted it to hackernews as a submission after finding it but there wasn't really much traction to it, I am not going to lie when I say this when this feature really resonated with me so much.
I hope more people come to know about linkhut, I hope I am doing my part in making people know about it :)
That is a cool project. Sorry to see it not get out of /new.
I have submitted it again after reading your comment. I definitely feel like certain discussions can happen on linkhut side which will be both interesting to read/write on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47629452
I wouldn't even call this a regression. Hand curated and edited feels like the future I want right now.
We're heading to a future where (when) friction is a luxury. Anyways, I thank the organizers for the rare opportunity. Long live Blogosphere.app, long live blogs.
Similarly, I feel like book publishers are about to become a thriving business soon again. With any book being most likely just a bot creation, trusting "Random House" sounds like a thing more of us will start paying attention to to make sure we're buying a human made thing.
That's assuming publishers don't decide to replace all their authors with AI.
Do you have any idea what killed webrings?
It seems to be simply a great idea...like...should we bring it back? Could we?
Search.
There was some overlap between the webring age and the early search age, but once search became entrenched and useful, webrings faded. Blogrolls survived for a little bit longer, but it was search.
Specifically, once search became the way you found the first page/site to begin with. Before search as default, you found sites in a bunch of scattershot ways: advertisements, word of mouth, lists in books, or lists on websites that updated periodically (that you had to have found/heard about one of the other ways) for example. Then you crawled out from there because that was the only way to find things. You had to either know the URL or use a link. And not all of the links/sites in the webrings were good.
Once search got good enough, people found the initial site via search and instead of taking their time clicking through a webring which might at any point lead them somewhere dead or useless, it was quicker to go back to the search page to find something else.
Page access went from being a chained together web of back and forth links to a 2 step process of search -> page.
I follow awesome lists. These are curated lists of software. It reverts google indexing, because search is awful.
About personal blogs... I have many many personal blogs in my repository. Around 4k. Respository below. The real problem is to find quality stuff. You can have millions of them, but if they are not worth my time, then what is the point?
I cannot verify and decide what is good manually. Obviously.
I think we cannot also rely on Google to provide rating, nor any corporation.
So I have my own ratings, because at least I will be able to find what I found worth before.
Link to my repo:
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
Sweet! Glad to see so many active personal blogs. We should push to bring back RSS feeds somehow. I really miss that era.
Love this! I very much appreciate the inclusion of a lightweight version, as I think lightweight discovery for blogs and the small web is where good tools and apps are needed.
Also, given that the lightweight version is very hn styled format it naturally leads my brain to imagining a version with upvotes and commenters (which may be a good or a bad thing) but with the link submission part automated. Not necessarily the intent here but it was the first time that particular combination of possibilities occurred to me as a way to do things.
Also curious about how these blogs are indexed/reviewed. Is the list ever pruned over time due to inactivity?
Thank you. The initial list was from blogroll.org (mentioned in the about page, and I emailed the person who built that). From then on, I review every submission that happens via the form.
The scheduler flags blogs that fail and doesn't try to fetch after a few tries. I'm still working on an effective way to re-review and prune. Open to any feedback.
I'd say a periodic job that looks at the last update of all your blogs, and removes those that haven't updated in over a year would be generally agreeable.
If you want to be exceptionally kind, you can also email the submitter and tell them their blog has been removed due to inactivity, so they'll remember to submit if they start blogging again.
I suppose my dream would be that the protocolization of this from back in the day gets revived in some way. Like a google pagecrawl style index built up from blogrolls (though I don't know if the blogroll itself was ever literally protocol-ized), combined with some checking of RSS feeds for activity. Or webrings, or something else.
Though in some respects these are less smart than what you're already doing, but I would like to think there's an elegant way to make an index emerge organically to minimize the editorial burden of any one person.
I always thought the "planets"[1][2][3] were a neat idea. I wish there were more of them for dedicated topics. Then I can just subscribe to specific planets which pulls curated feeds from various blogs on that topic.
[1] Planet Gnome: https://planet.gnome.org/
[2] Planet Debian: https://planet.debian.org/
[3] Planet GNU: https://planet.gnu.org/
I've been building an index of planets and related projects. There's a lot, especially for technical topics, but I also wish there were more.
Ctrl-F for planet: https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/
There's an older list at https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplan...
Vaguely related, I did an extremely basic RSS feed combiner ages ago: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ when there was that one post where people could share their blogs and many of those had RSS feeds.
That said, it got its list of feeds from the repo that someone made which hasn't been updated in a few years, so even if new blog content gets pulled, the list of blogs doesn't change. Oh well, wasn't a super serious project.
Ooooh I love these indie web aggregators. I wrote about some of my favorite ones here if anyone's curious: https://nelson.cloud/how-i-discover-new-blogs/.
But here are some of my fav ways to discover blogs:
- https://minifeed.net/welcome
- https://indieblog.page/
- https://1mb.club/
- https://512kb.club/
- https://250kb.club/
I should create an aggregator aggregator
I'd like to submit my own aggregator to your list:
https://limereader.com/
It aggregates the top articles on STEAMD topics (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math, and Design) from various forums and displays them in chronological order.
This includes forums like Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, Slashdot, Bear, and some science, tech & programming related subreddits.
You can read more here:
https://limereader.com/about
This is awesome. I find myself seeking out blogs nowadays as many of the best forums have died out and reddit has dropped in quality significantly.
I typically use marginalia and wiby to make finding posts from blogs easier, but I like the idea of providing hn style mechanics to blog posts, so many of which lack the ability to comment/discuss the material. At the same time, while I think this is a useful tool, I am a little weary of the aggregation and consolidation of the web.
Lovely!
Those who enjoy this might also like:
- https://kagi.com/smallweb
- https://blogroll.org/
- https://minifeed.net/welcome
- https://ooh.directory/
https://powrss.com
and https://slashpages.net is also a nice way to discover new blogs...
This is great, thanks! It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing. I'm always up for that, and plan on spending plenty of time exploring the list.
I’ve submitted mine as well - cheers!
>It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing
I don't know that I've heard a better description of the thing the so-called small web is about than that. It's the clearest answer to the "why" of having a small web of discoverable personal blogs and sites.
That is such a lovely way to put it. Do you mind if I add it to the about page and link to this comment?
I've come to the conclusion that Hacker News is the best aggregator out there. Substack knows my interests yet gives terrible recommendations. Youtube constantly recommends the same videos or exaggerates my interest in a topic based on a few views, spamming me with related content until I watch something unrelated. The only downside of Hacker News is that its focus is narrower than other sites. But perhaps because the focus is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" there is a bias towards things I find interesting with less noise than more commercial offerings.
Very clean site, well done. I’ve built something similar, but it also has an algorithmic front page option as well based on the “standard” algorithm from Reddit/HN: https://engineered.at
I also have it wired up to gpt nano for topic extraction and summary creation per post, if you register for an account (free) you can also follow sources and topics to fine tune things.
I have a big list of features to continue adding to it, like an ability to “claim” your site so you can get some analytics from the site, and potentially to boost your site in the algorithm. Might also add a jobs board.
If you’re interested, while this site is closed source, the feed monitoring rails engine is open source: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
Not sure if you want feedback on this, but mine is free.
The lists are impenetrable for my eye, I think an key mistake is that you don't use an accent color for titles in lists (i.e. look at a google serp).
That you don't directly link the content, felt like an offense, followed by a slap in the face looking at an AI generated summary.
The layout feels too reddit and too industrialized and the way you plan to progress the project, rings my "pet project to slam ad's on" bells.
I think the pure intent of OPs site naturally makes it more approachable and likeable.
This is great. But I’ve bookmarked at least 10 of these aggregators over the years, and I never revisit any of them. Partly because I don’t have the time to browse and discover new content.
I also don’t read the blog spam from prolific writers who pop up here every two days, especially the low-quality ones constantly yapping about AI. So the number of blogs I revisit is a handful, and I have a page on my site listing them [1]. Some of the blogs I’ve listed also have backlinks to my site. It’s super simple and works fairly well for me. Plus there’s rss.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/blogroll/
> Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/
Could you add a form submission button next to the filter, so that it doesn't require JavaScript? (Or actually that can probably be done easily enough with some kind of CSS variable-setting trick...?)
Very cool! Love the minimal design a lot, unsurprisingly.
My Minifeed [1] started with a similar goal of having a "HN for blogs", but then it grew to include search, related recommendations, custom feeds, lists, etc. I don't have categories though.
[1] https://minifeed.net/
I would love a old-school search engine that pulls results purely from a well curated list of websites and blogs.
There's also this: https://minifeed.net/global
However, I think (text.)Blogosphere has a nicer interface, personally. Maybe I'm just used to HN.
Amazing that the minimal version works in Dillo, except for the categories menu which uses JS (using a form and submit button inside a noscript tag would work as a fallback).
Nice job. A small suggestion, unless I completely missed it, an option to filter by post / blog language.
Great feedback. I will add search to this minimal version. The non-minimal version comes with search. Filter by language is something neither has and will be a great addition.
Small web, try this one https://bubbles.town
Bubbles is different, because the front page is created by real people voting. It also supports comments, blogs in EN and DE, as well as following blogs.
How do you curate the blogs that are being added to this? I see that there's a way to submit your own blog, but was there a list you started with initially? Thanks for making this!
Very nice, this is great! Love that you give the two UX options.
FYI (bug report): In the non-minimal version, navigating by category is janky in FireFox. The logo briefly disappears with the nav jumping up in its place every time you click a category.
Ah, thank you. I will check this.
Just following up to say "You fixed it!" :)
Any plans on adding a way to filter out "lower quality" posts which usually dominate chronologically sorted post lists?
And, possibly a way to filter type of content more in-depth than just one category?
No plans to add a filter for "lower quality" since that takes away from the ethos of RSS. Certainly looking to add more ways to filter. Open to ideas.
It's refreshing to to see something intentionally uncurated.
I think "low quality" content has it's place. A lot of my favourite blogs back in the day could be considered "low quality", but for whatever reason I liked them and read their stuff... Same was true of my own blog. It wasn't particularly high quality but back then even a lowish quality blog would still occasionally be surfaced on Google if the right key words were searched for.
I miss this about modern YouTube too... I used to love watching content from small creators even if their content was "lower quality", but it's so hard to discover that type of content today.
Everywhere you go there is an algorithm pushing you towards larger and more professional creators. And that can be fine, but it's nice to have some balance.
If you think about it, Shakespeare's first poem was probably crap. If his entire career were judged from that, then we wouldn't have Hamlet.
"quality" is something you care about if you want to virtue signal your professional or intellectual capability, usually as part of a monetization scheme. Hacker News cares so much about quality because this forum is attached to a billion dollar startup incubator, and for many people here their persona is business. Posting on substack is business for most people. Posting on medium is business for most people. "Quality" is just another kind of influencer culture.
Writing blogs shouldn't be about marketing and reading blogs shouldn't be about maximizing information density. The vast vast majority of blogs on the old web that everyone yearns to return to weren't "high quality." You were just writing about whatever, likely in a style that would get you downvoted on HN for being insufficiently substantive, and if you were lucky someone else might read it.
I wouldn't even call it "low quality" so much as "non-commercial."
This is a great idea. I think you should ask people to pay a subscription for commenting. Turn it into a community supported site from the get go!
i can't describe how happy this project makes me feel. Honestly, i don't even know why. I mean, the idea is great but it's nothing "extra", still it just feels right. Like breath of fresh air.
One recommendation is to keep header fixed on scroll so you can always nav away. most sites fail to do this it seems
Fixed header isn't always a good thing, it can also be a mistake. Since content is the product, let the content take up all available space and use your browser navigation capabilities to navigate if necessary
Great work, I haven't updated my public site in years while I waited for the LLM stuff to play out, but you've inspired me to put it back out there and submit.
That's great. I wish we could convince more people to use similar tools regularly, myself included.
It may not 'scale' as well as algorithmic feeds, but maybe that's what will save the Web. We need more sweat and passion, both in curation of content and in the effort to find it.
This is awesome! I'm happy someone made this exist.
I love this (and submitted my blog) - people bemoan the death of the Old Web™ but in reality there is still heaps of great content being created.
Question, is this strictly chronological, or is there anything at all to make this an "algorithmic feed" like HN, reddit, twitter, or facebook? (list is roughly in the order of less shitty to more shitty, but note that none of them are chronological, unlike, say, a RSS reader aggregating some set of blogs)
This is strictly chronological. No voting, no algorithm.
Love this! New homepage for me. Do you have a buy me coffee button to help keep it live?
Appreciate it :) I don't have one. This is hosted on Cloudflare as a static site and a cron that runs on a $5 VM (that also hosts other things). So it doesn't cost me much to keep it alive other than the domain cost. I built it this way intentionally so that I can keep this running forever.
Right! My concern with these tools is sometimes they are too good for this world and likely to live a few months.
Thanks for sharing, it's a great idea! but the site is not reachable now, it stuck.
Addition of a "Dark Mode" button would be much appreciated!
Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!
Hey, I am just getting started with blogging, could/should I submit my website too?
I love it.
I'd love a search bar and maybe a means to sort by popularity (however you define it.)
I like that it's free and clean and direct; I hope it remains that way!
Superb! Thank you. Psychologically, the minimal version feels perfect; as if it were more connected with the spirit of blogging.
TBH I'd love to see that idea as a /blogs list here at HN.
Something like this is very much needed.
I hope to see more things like this.
What would be really cool is if there was a personalized algorithm (for you page) that stored data and processed locally.
Thank you. I wanted to mostly stay away from algorithmic feed to stay true to RSS. On the non-minimal version of the site, you can sign up and follow blogs to have a "For You" tab, but it's still recent posts from blogs you follow.
Instead or in addition to following blogs, what I'd love to have is a way to filter out those I don't like.
Local keyword exclusions (to keep the server requirement minimal) might be pretty high impact.
This feels so Yahoo-1994. Love that we are getting back to our origins thanks to AI.
That's so funny: I just reactivated my Yahoo email address.
Did you use Frontpage to create your frontpage?
<meta name="generator" content="FrontPage 4.0">
Then add A BUNCH of extra XML to bloat the page nicely
Back in the day, MS FrontPage was indeed synonymous with nested and unreliable page structure.
I wish I could go back and tell them it is nothing compared to what passes for web output in the 21st century.
Great concept, I miss the ability to like things though.
ah, looks like the .app version covers that. I will have to check it out outside of work.
Great idea! Could you add a "music" category please for blogs?
"A woman had sex with identical twins and now it's impossible to tell who is the father", is this a blog post or news or sarcastic news or what the hell
This is great. I'm curious what's your vision on adding comments?
If you're referring to comments on the website, I plan to keep it minimal (the text version is a static site).
If you're referring to comments on blogs in general, I have many thoughts. Back in the day, comments used to be how you connected with people and let other people find you. It also came with spam (spam plugins could only do so much).
With the rise of static site generators, most people don't have comments on their blogs now. It is something I miss though.
I haven’t had comments on my blog for over a decade now and I don’t miss them. For every useful and informative comment I got several spammy or rude reply. Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media.
I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.
I've had comments (open, anonymous, no screening) on my blog since it started in 2004. Back in the day when it was very popular, most of my blog posts were the result of reader tips/advice/heads-up/etc. I have to work MUCH harder now that comments have pretty much dried up.
Yes, unfortunately spam and rude replies come with comments. I also don't have comments on my blog. I instead have one of those email masking services that allows to people to email me (and I have found this effective).
Isn't that that point of POSSE[1]? Host your blog, post a link to it on social sites like Mastodon, and let the conversation happen on Mastodon.
[1] https://indieweb.org/POSSE
> Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media.
But, can they?
There is cusdis[1] for comments on a static site.
1: https://cusdis.com/
My literal brain pictured blogosphere's frontpage as something with users, rankings and comments on the websibe.
But moderation and spam are still the hardest problems indeed.
Very cool! This was a good impetus to actually add RSS to my blog.
It's a very modern and clean design.
Interesting. I submitted mine.
Yeah we need to make curated human signals stronger.
scoring will bring spam and voting brigades if not managed properly
Great idea!
Great job.
Submitted my blog.
Thank you. I approved your blog. Quick note: It looks like your feed items don't have published date which makes it hard to store and sort recent posts.
>Thank you. I approved your blog.
Can't find it.
> It looks like your feed items don't have published date which makes it hard to store and sort recent posts
Okay, you mean the RSS feed?
give people the ability to curate their own collections and publish them
On the non-minimal version, you can signup for an account and follow blogs (curate your fav blogs). I will add an option to making your list public.
FWIW hackr.news has a smallweb filter: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
But kudos for different people working on similar good ideas
Nice and clean.
Hahahahha... I was trying to build something like this for a while. Seems like I wasn't the only one with this idea. So happy someone finally did it!
If anyone looking for something even more minimalist, give the HN x Small Web RSS feed a try
https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&limit=50&smallweb=t...
Cool project.
Variety! I appreciate that it's not all tech writing from tech blogs from people in tech like almost every blog list/aggregator thing on HN.
This doesn't have an RSS feed? bummer
yeah +12 if it had an rss feed
It's the next item on the list I plan to add. Likely will be adding it today.
Yes!! I found a new website to use :-)
I just hope if you can add dark-mode, I use hackernews essential which adds dark mode and more features which I really like in hackernews, Perhaps something like this can be added but overall I really like it!
You have (essentially) just made something which I imagined 2 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41789661: Ask HN: Are you interested in a Hacker News alternative which doesnt focus on AI (Oct 9 2024)
My point, which has only grown to an even larger degree is that Hackernews has too many AI discussions, which both feels a bit fomo to me and also I am seeing AI generated blog posts and comments now on Hackernews as well.
At some point, I want a website where I can talk about the more human aspects, some occasional AI mention is fine but not if a quarter or half of front page is hackernews and some genuinely nice projects don't get the attention :(
I had joined hackernews to read those content pieces and fell in love with the human discussion aspect but now there are definitely moments of browsing hackernews which makes me feel as to what I had written in the ask HN
my last line within the ask HN was: I just want people who don't want the latest ai hype to gather around and discuss some other cool things which are "not" AI. This kind of fits into that
Adding my submissions of blog-posts into it in sometime :) See you there!
Nice project
perfect.
This is silly.
RSS readers exist. Feed a Fever was even better.
I will be that guy: how is this different from HN? Or the many niche subreddits that already do this? I am seriously asking.
To me, it seems like a poor version of subreddits with HN shell to wash it down.
Now please build a frontpage for all the frontpages on blogs
super dope. now make it infinite scroll and put ads all over the place! /s
Funny timing — I tried to submit my own Show HN today for a small Linux app I've been building and got blocked because my account is too new. Spent the afternoon reading through HN threads to build up some karma instead. Feels like the indie software equivalent of the same problem this project is trying to solve — it's getting harder for small, genuine projects to find an audience without gaming some system first. Appreciate what you've built here!