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  • Hacker News
  • 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.
    by zingar
  • Nice job, clean and well built. I built something very similar, with a focus on engineering/product/startup blogs https://engineered.at

    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

    by dchuk
  • The summaries are a great idea.

    It would be interesting to extract devices and inventions from articles to create an "inventions race" (as opposed to "arms race.") It could be used to establish prior-art and negate a lot of expensive and unnecessary patents that end up going nowhere or used for trolling. That's something I have been thinking about for tinkeri.ng. Something comparable to a patent archive - but used for networking and sharing. Would end up looking like a wiki with articles getting pingbacks.

    by adrianwaj
  • 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
    by wwfn
  • "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"
    by jdiff
  • It would be great if this supported federation as a Lemmy community, given that Lemmy already has votes.
    by RobotToaster
  • 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.

    by altairprime
  • Hide button appears after sign-in. You can eather hide individual posts or specific blogs.
    by viermalbe
  • Bubbles dev here, thanks for the mention
    by viermalbe
  • how do you decide which blog is included in the aggregation?
    by AbuAssar
  • 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.

    by stakhanov
  • 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.
    by RobotToaster
  • The Briefings have been most useful for me. It feels more curated and less firehose-y.

    https://bubbles.town/briefing

    by bovermyer
  • Would love a version of this on HN.
    by frereubu
  • You can try with https://news.ycombinator.com/best
    by gus_massa
  • Also, showing the excerpts from the post text is vastly superior to just showing the post titles.
    by lapcat
  • Very exciting! And I like the fediverse integration too.

    > $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

    by throwawayk7h
  • I saw it and completed it as “top posts” “new posts” “hot posts” “my posts”.
    by siddboots
  • What happens when the instance admin gets bored? Fediverse doesn't to my knowledge have a good migration policy. I can't imagine this is recommended since even the forum hosting related proposals [1] requires email.

    [1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-521a-representing-...

    by casey2
  • 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.
    by janaagaard
  • nope, I prefer open in new tab by default
    by AbuAssar
  • Too bad it's so hard to submit a suggested blog.
    by bookofjoe
  • 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.

    by viermalbe
  • 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.
    by exitnode
  • +1 to this. Apple sign-in would be ideal, since it maps to single-identity more cleanly than a social media system.
    by Schiendelman
  • I'm curios why you are avoiding social media?
    by AbuAssar
  • The site you are trying to make an account on is social media, the current site you are on (news.ycombinator.com) has more dark patterns than the average fediverse instance.

    It's just a protocol Email uses SMTP to push text from @domainA to @domainB. The Fediverse uses ActivityPub to push JSON-LD from @domainA to @domainB.

    It's also vastly easier to self-host than email.

    by casey2
  • 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.

    by rsolva
  • 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
    by brulx126
  • 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

    by solid_fuel