Hacker News but for Independent Blogs
bubbles.townI 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.
Too bad it's so hard to submit a suggested blog.
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 :)
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.
Reminds me of Pride Month.
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.
This. Principle of least surprise.
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.
Next they’ll be defending full screen div paywalls.
I'd rather have an icon next to the link that implies "Open in new Tab" like one of these with the arrow:
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.
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.
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!)
why the downvotes, I meant to demonstrate that I prefer the current behaviour so the site developer knows.
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.
Search doesn’t seem to work.
The Briefings have been most useful for me. It feels more curated and less firehose-y.
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.
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
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.
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 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!
Because there’s little good about it
Its a scam
+1 to this. Apple sign-in would be ideal, since it maps to single-identity more cleanly than a social media system.
[delayed]
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.
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
This reminds me of Kagi's Small Web: https://kagi.com/smallweb/ or https://kagi.com/smallweb/river
> "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.
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.
It would be great if this supported federation as a Lemmy community, given that Lemmy already has votes.
This is it!! I can finally leave reading comments on hn or get bamboozeled by ai posts masquerading as something technical
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.
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
Oh, great, I can log in with my GoToSocial instance to comment and vote! I will definitely add this site alongside my HN addiction :)
Please make AI a category.
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.
> 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].
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.
Just curious but isn't this just digg, metafilter?
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.
I love it!
This is lovely
Ah, this reminds me of StumbleUpon.