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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.

Too bad it's so hard to submit a suggested blog.

nope, I prefer open in new tab by default

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.

Would love a version of this on HN.

Also, showing the excerpts from the post text is vastly superior to just showing the post titles.

It looks like there's an RSS feed at the bottom. If you don't want to use the social aspects of the site, maybe just use that in an RSS reader?

*Link: https://bubbles.town/rss

I haven't tried but in principle you only need a Mastodon compatible authentication, there are other services that are not twitter clones. See for example https://fedi.tips/what-other-kinds-of-servers-are-on-the-fed... or more complete https://fediverse.observer/allsoftwares

I do NOT consider the Fediverse and the myriads of implementations of it to be social media, but rather a social web. More like websites with the abilities to communicate and interact in different and interesting ways.

Social media is dead, and has been for a while. Many use it still, but it is not primarily social. The social part was mainly a ploy to get peoples attention and then badly abusing it in ever more creative and sinister ways.

+1 to this. Apple sign-in would be ideal, since it maps to single-identity more cleanly than a social media system.

I'm curios why you are avoiding social media?

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.

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.

how do you decide which blog is included in the aggregation?

Was it the one where doing yoga and eating healthy is a white supremacist dog whistle?

Same haha

Visually difficult to read with all of the colors, but I thought the content was good.

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.

I thought the same. I like the idea of it and probably use it to find nice blogs, but it looks like AI-coded.

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.

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.

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.

you might find this little extension i wrote for HN: https://github.com/kavehtehrani/hackernews-savedyouaclick

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.

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.

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).