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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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...
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!)
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.
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
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
wow, always right clicked then clicked open in new tab. Middle click now saves me one click - thanks!
You can set a user preference to open in a new tab. The reverse is not true.
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.
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.
Thanks for adding RSS! Bringing Bubbles (and HN) into NetNewsWire is a game-changer for content discovery and keeping a clean reading list.
Too bad it's so hard to submit a suggested blog.
Making it too easy invites spam.
Sending a single email seems like a good compromise to me.
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.
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.
> 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.
He says in a comment on hackernews.
viermalbe: Done! Thank you.
Here is the response from Bubbles:
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
nope, I prefer open in new tab by default
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.
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.
Exactly. This is a design choice and there’s no right or wrong here.
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.
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
XHTML ftw :)
> 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.
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.
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.
Wrong again.
The idiots here are arguing to follow default, de-facto specifications and to give users an easy accessible choice.
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.
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.
This. Principle of least surprise.
Next they’ll be defending full screen div paywalls.
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.
Have you considered middle clicking instead of leftclicking?
I'd rather have an icon next to the link that implies "Open in new Tab" like one of these with the arrow:
https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/new-tab
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
only on a mac, and probably only on safari which leaves the majority of people in the lurch.
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!)
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.
No worries :)
why the downvotes, I meant to demonstrate that I prefer the current behaviour so the site developer knows.
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
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".
The downvoters meant to demonstrate that they prefer the standard/expected behavior and would like OP to ignore your opinion on the matter.
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.
Is blogging always like that? Always has been.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.)
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
The briefing pages also have RSS, this way you see the most relevant stuff https://bubbles.town/editions
Hmmz the "briefing" rss feed can't be filtered by "minimum votes", i believe...?
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 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.
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.
Exactly! It is so empowering to host my own instance at home and own my own identity online, using GoToSocial.
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 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.
+1 to this. Apple sign-in would be ideal, since it maps to single-identity more cleanly than a social media system.
Bug.
?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm curios why you are avoiding social media?
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.
> I'm curios why you are avoiding social media?
You make it sound as if that's undesirable.
Because there’s little good about it
Its a scam
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!
Email the mods and ask them to detach and relocate it.
The Briefings have been most useful for me. It feels more curated and less firehose-y.
https://bubbles.town/briefing
Would love a version of this on HN.
https://hcker.news
also
https://hckrnews.com
for a slightly different take on the concept
Also, showing the excerpts from the post text is vastly superior to just showing the post titles.
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.
> 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.
This reminds me of Kagi's Small Web: https://kagi.com/smallweb/ or https://kagi.com/smallweb/river
Bubbles dev here, thanks for the mention
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.
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).
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.
It runs on Go + sqlite on a Hetzner machine, built from scratch, not a re-skin.
Clearly inspired by HN, there are few sites where I have to zoom in to get any kind of readability ;)
What type of Hetzner box are you running this on?
> not a re-skin
Is that something you're frequently accused of, or why the "disclaimer"?
They were directly answering the post above which asked if it's a re-skin.
The comment they were replying to specifically asked if it was a re-skin.
Ah yes of course, finally paid the price of reading comments in isolation. Thanks and sorry :)
Not really, I just picked it up from the initial question from stakhanov.
how do you decide which blog is included in the aggregation?
You can find the criteria in the FAQ: https://bubbles.town/faq#sources
try about page, it explains
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.
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...
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!)
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!
> "5011 independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you."
That line is so claude.
I thought the same. I like the idea of it and probably use it to find nice blogs, but it looks like AI-coded.
Oh, great, I can log in with my GoToSocial instance to comment and vote! I will definitely add this site alongside my HN addiction :)
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.
Curious on your "Top" algorithm? I see many 1-voted items there.
Also, how do you vet your blogs?
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.
Was it the one where doing yoga and eating healthy is a white supremacist dog whistle?
Same haha
This is it!! I can finally leave reading comments on hn or get bamboozeled by ai posts masquerading as something technical
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
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.
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.
Search doesn’t seem to work.
nice
Please make AI a category.
I like it, but shouldn't this be part of "Show HN"?
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.
Ah, okay, thanks for your reply. I understand now.
Just curious but isn't this just digg, metafilter?
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!).
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.
It's not stated explicitly, but I would assume that 'independent' blog means no Substack, no Medium, etc? Is that the case?
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.
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.
This is lovely
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552985
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.
> (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).
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.
> 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?
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].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
I love it!
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 agree, clarity would be nice here. Similarly, I would like to be able to see top week/month/year.
you might find this little extension i wrote for HN: https://github.com/kavehtehrani/hackernews-savedyouaclick
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"
https://bubbles.town/about
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.
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.
A few random links:
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
Ben Syversen
> 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
The CrafsMan is great, a lovely voice to listen to as he works, and makes a bunch of fun diy crafts. A good amount of videos to work thru:
https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCrafsMan
Sorry, I copied my old comment.
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
Open...
"the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle"
Close... guess I will stick to HN
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.
> https://tuesdaynight.blog/i-want-to-go-to-a-furry-con/
Ok. I think I'm good without this.
Visually difficult to read with all of the colors, but I thought the content was good.
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!!
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!
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.
Ah, this reminds me of StumbleUpon.
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.
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.
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.
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!