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.

$N independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you.

This sounds a bit AI-generated (i.e. bland). I would just remove that line entirely from the UI.

top / new / hot / my

this is a non-parallel construction[1], "my" sounds weird here to an english speaker. These can all be read as adjuncts if you change it to "mine".

[1] https://www.grammar.com/nonparallel-construction

https://bubbles.town/briefing

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.

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

What's your tech stack? Mine is pretty vanilla ruby on rails, while my site is closed source, I did open source a rails engine for adaptive monitoring of RSS feeds that does a lot of the heavy lifting: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor

"5011 independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you."

That line is so claude.

Rap Dash is great too in case you're into rap: https://rapdash.com/

No thanks, I don't need any extra stress in my life.

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

Also, how do you vet your blogs?

14/30 of the posts on the top page are just about making websites

1. https://sidebar.io

Top does not sort? Also "top" is what exactly? All time? Today?

How do you defend against brigading?

Obligatory mention of Minifeed, a curated directory, reader and search engine for personal blogs: https://minifeed.net/

I’ve been running it for a few years now. You can build a personal feed, follow others, see related blogs and posts, and use full-text search across all blogs.

Feel free to submit your own or someone else’s blog here: https://minifeed.net/suggest

Click

Read top link

It's some garbage about white supremacy

Read second link

It's a Hacker News story about Linux

Same for the next three links

Read sixth link

More garbage about white supremacy and how Trump bad

Close site and don't bother to remember its name

This isn't normal and this isn't how the Internet used to be

independent blogs

looks inside

american politics and culture war

I guess my choice is Hacker News with its AI obsession, or just abandoning the internet. There is no escaping the shit that has infected the rest of social media

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://smackernews.com/item/48552985 HN

"the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle"

Close... guess I will stick to HN

https://tuesdaynight.blog/i-want-to-go-to-a-furry-con/

Ok. I think I'm good without this.

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.