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?
Bingo!
Hacker News but for independent blogs
211–220 of 232 posts
Re: Hacker News but for independent blogs
#212Excited 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 th…
"X but for Y" has been around for a good long time, it long predates (and I would say is significantly distinct from) "not X, but Y"
I think they're both "negative parallelism" constructs. Either way, neither are new.
The prose on https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/its-not-just-data-its-pos... changed how I think about it: the framework is useful for reasoning, not lazy writing. This bubbles.town submission's title could be light evidence of negative parallelism's utility. (Or, more likely, just the stochastic nature of what's popular when)
Re: Hacker News but for independent blogs
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
viermalbe: Done! Thank you.
Here is the response from Bubbles: From: Benjamin Behnke 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 th…
Do you write a bunch of posts and the schedule them? You put out 3 posts every single day at exactly 0800, 1200 and 1600.
Re: Hacker News but for independent blogs
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Mastodon doesn't solve the stated goal by the service of why they want you to have a login. ;)
I asked a specific question, per your request. You've ignored it. As for the stated reasons for utilising Mastodon as a sign-on service, Bubbles seems to share my views: Why Fediverse and not email/password login? We don't want to manage accounts. No passwords to store, no emails to verify, no spam accounts to moderate. The Fediverse handles identity for us, and no single company controls it. It's difficult to tell w…
Late add: above quote from https://bubbles.town/faq>.
Re: Hacker News but for independent blogs
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Hmmm... very disappointing that when I unchecked "politics" in Filter, that post remained in the list.
The post (after reading it) is not political in the today sense. It’s connecting an in vogue concept to toxic thought patterns and notes a correlation in both the patterns and trending association of some influencers to a specific political segment.
The point the author is trying to cover is that a lifestyle and aesthetic the author naturally aligns with actually actively excludes her - and that pattern is seen elsewhere and (author opinion) has wider implications.
I’d argue it’s a fair and not a political statement (there is some text that indicates the preference of the author) but a human realizing and sharing their exclusion from a group and that the exclusion expands into (again, author perspective) defined categories of people. Talking about thoughts and opinions is… what I expect from a blog.
Re: Hacker News but for independent blogs
#216looks 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
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.
thanks for recommending kagi small web, just going through their random posts page i've already seen lots of nice stuff on there
Re: Hacker News but for independent blogs
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
>For non-techies like me, Fediverse accounts and mastodon.social are non-starters. You can literally sign up for a Mastodon account on mastodon.social or most other instances through the web like any other website. It's no more difficult than a Reddit account.
2 things: 1) Neither I nor most non-techies have a clue what an "instance" is. 2) Reddit banned me years ago for no reason I could think of.
1) literally millions of people, many of whom are non-techies, have figured it out, just like they figured out what "subreddits" were and what "tweets" were and the specific quirks of numerous other platforms.
2) yes the people who own servers get to decide what happens on them. That isn't a feature (or bug) of the fediverse its just the way networks work. But if you don't want to join an instance you can get one hosted on a service like masto.host (the one I use) for very little.
Re: Hacker News but for independent blogs
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is the response from Bubbles: From: Benjamin Behnke 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 th…
Do you write a bunch of posts and the schedule them? You put out 3 posts every single day at exactly 0800, 1200 and 1600.
Yes. Just so. From 2004 to 2014 I published 8 (eight) posts daily, every day, one minute after the hour. They appeared at 8:01/9:01/10:01/11:01 am; 12:01/1:01/2:01/3:01 pm.
Re: Hacker News but for independent blogs
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Ctrl+Click / Cmd+Click also opens in a new tab.
Re: Hacker News but for independent blogs
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s funny, sites like these are so divisive. I’ve gotten as many “do not llm summarize anything for me” as I’ve gotten “this is super handy!” responses. I like them, so I’m keeping them. Interesting idea overall. Could be generalized to just general trend identification I think based on named entity recognition (like google trends). Over time you can trace first mentions of stuff and buzz over time. I’ll noodle on i…
Yep, you could have an options menu (like at hcker.news) and have the ability to switch the summaries off or even extend them? Could also make them blacker and larger? Also, looks like ArticlesBase stopped in 2024 - maybe offer a way for users to upload articles, summarize them and then people can micropay to read? Maybe just charge for older articles? Can also charge for extra long articles? Put everything into an L…
I’ve been noodling on an idea sort of similar, which is to have a system where if you register for an account and very your site (with a technical mechanism in place to enforce that), you get a slight boost in the ranking algorithm for your content. Then, if you pay a small monthly fee, you get an additional boost in rankings, as well as some amount of (anonymized appropriately) analytics about your content performance on the site. Not sure if anyone would ever want to use that and I don’t have anywhere near the traffic for that to be worth it yet, but seems worth playing with.
I also want to add content digests/newsletters that highlights best content of the week for sharing on twitter and via email to those who register accounts. Typical growth marketing stuff