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.

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.

So many comments debating the philosophy around this. I like it when these type of sites open a new tab for me. Is there a way to just code in a toggle between the two link opening types?

Middle-click a link to open a new tab. I can't force a link to open in the same window but I can with new tabs.

Sometimes it's easier to follow a link, have a look, and then go back without jumping around tabs.

I like that in Kagi I can set this as an option.

Default, on the same tab (since browsers have options around this), but allow users to select if they want it on a new tab/window.

You can set a user preference to open in a new tab. The reverse is not true.

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

Making it too easy invites spam.

Sending a single email seems like a good compromise to me.

I agree, that would be a good compromise and I would do it in a heartbeat, but that's NOT the procedure. More is required:

>Participating

>You log in with a Fediverse account (Mastodon, Pixelfed, GoToSocial, and others). If you don't have one, mastodon.social is free and takes two minutes.

For non-techies like me, Fediverse accounts and mastodon.social are non-starters.

Too bad.

A single email WOULD be great, as you point out.

Sign-in is only needed to interact with the site, like voting or hiding entries. If you want to suggest your own blog, just send a mail to suggest@bubbles.town as described in the FAQ.

> For non-techies like me, Fediverse accounts and mastodon.social are non-starters.

For technical people these things should be non starters as well. It is a group of people who should be acutely aware of everything wrong with social media, and many are not.

viermalbe: Done! Thank you.

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 :)

> Exactly. This is a design choice and there’s no right or wrong here.

I don't agree. If your design choice forces a user flow that is surprising, awkward, and redundant then it's definitely the wrong choice. It's still a call to be made by the design team, though.

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.

Wrong again.

The idiots here are arguing to follow default, de-facto specifications and to give users an easy accessible choice.

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.

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.

I'd rather have an icon next to the link that implies "Open in new Tab" like one of these with the arrow:

https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/new-tab

> I'd rather have an icon next to the link that implies "Open in new Tab" like one of these with the arrow:

That is a valid option for detachable UI elements seen in desktop apps.

Opening links in a separate tab or window is not that thought. That is a first class user flow in web design.

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.

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!)

oh, sorry, your suggestion wasn't unrealistic enough to not be believable so my sarcasm detector failed.

i took ___ to mean the option key which has this symbol made up of lines: "⌥", it is also the key most likely to be used for such a feature, so i figured that's what you must be talking about.

if you weren't then the key most certainly doesn't exist on a mac either, and i apologize for the downvote. unfortunately it appears that i can't undo it anymore so i hope someone else will compensate with an upvote.

No worries :)

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.

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.

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

https://bubbles.town/briefing

Would love a version of this on HN.

also

https://hckrnews.com

for a slightly different take on the concept

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

Hmmz the "briefing" rss feed can't be filtered by "minimum votes", i believe...?

The briefing rss feed contains one entry per day with a link to that days briefing page. The briefing itself cannot be customized, it's the same for everybody.

For the list views you can use the filter menu to filter by min votes or subscribe to any of the min vote rss feeds.

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 can't speak to other fediverse software but I tried a few lemmy servers to no avail. My mastodon instance is under maintenance so I guess I'll have to wait until that's done to sign up.

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.

To me, social web == social media.

I don't use Facebook but use it for auth when I have no other option.

Even worse, I don't want an external service federating my identity when I can avoid it. We have all heard of people getting locked out in cases where Google decided to ban a user from their platform.

I'm never trusting an external provider again.

Exactly! It is so empowering to host my own instance at home and own my own identity online, using GoToSocial.

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

Bug.

?

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'm curios why you are avoiding social media?

You make it sound as if that's undesirable.

Because there’s little good about it

Its a scam

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!

Email the mods and ask them to detach and relocate it.

This reminds me of Kagi's Small Web: https://kagi.com/smallweb/ or https://kagi.com/smallweb/river

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.

This would be really cool. With the process of allowing fediverse logins it would be nice to also be able to use lemmy accounts since right now those don't seem to work. (That might be related to the HN hug though I'm not sure).

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

Curious on your "Top" algorithm? I see many 1-voted items there.

Also, how do you vet your blogs?

It would be great if this supported federation as a Lemmy community, given that Lemmy already has votes.

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?

Same haha

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.

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.

> "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.

Oh, great, I can log in with my GoToSocial instance to comment and vote! I will definitely add this site alongside my HN addiction :)

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.

Ah, okay, thanks for your reply. I understand now.

Search doesn’t seem to work.

It's not stated explicitly, but I would assume that 'independent' blog means no Substack, no Medium, etc? Is that the case?

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.

Isn't the whole point of Substack, etc. monetization, one way or another? Maybe I'm just a cranky old man, but that to me goes against 'independent'. But then, I'm not just old enough to remember when blogs weren't monetized, but remembering perusing Factsheet Five to see if there were any interesting new zines to trade with. Maybe you could mark the Substack blogs with a little swastika like an asterisk.

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

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.

Please make AI a category.

Ao refreshing that new links open in new windows - such a time saver dor those pf us who open hundreds of windows.

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

How do you defend against brigading?

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

Just curious but isn't this just digg, metafilter?

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.

The title is wrong as they are not just different in sourcing but topic.

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

I love it!

Ah, this reminds me of StumbleUpon.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552985

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).

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].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013