This reads like a kneejerk reaction to the title, which I understand. I think it's deliberately written that way to draw you in, but I get how it could be upsetting.

Her point isn't that "fitness is white supremacy," and not even remotely close. Just that the social media and culture around wellness and fitness can give off white supremacist, fascist energy by presenting an extremely unobtainable and yet highly idealized state of being, where everyone is very thin and white and fits within the stereotypes of the gender assigned to them, which is not remotely how the world at large can be.

Actually, reading it again, I don't see the author calling out anyone in particular, just noting that the culture around a thing they otherwise enjoy makes them uncomfortable, and why.

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!).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I thought the same. I like the idea of it and probably use it to find nice blogs, but it looks like AI-coded.

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.

Long ago when we didn’t have Movable Type and every blog was either a work journal on a gopher prefix or a hand-maintained directory of HTML files, this was always the case; a significant fraction, if not an outright majority, of the people willing to try out new styles of interaction are also going to post introspectively about styles of interaction. Developing communities requires discussing developing communities, after all! So it is normal for something that is ‘bubbling’ up from the cauldron of experiments to have a degree of navel-gazing inherent in it — and given how catastrophically blogging went once it lost that aspect, I can accept some amount of ‘seeing how the social structure sausage is made’ if it shifts the overall scales back towards meaningful.

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.

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

Was it the one where doing yoga and eating healthy is a white supremacist dog whistle?

nope, I prefer open in new tab by default

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.

Visually difficult to read with all of the colors, but I thought the content was good.

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.

how do you decide which blog is included in the aggregation?

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

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 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

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

I'm curios why you are avoiding social media?

Also, showing the excerpts from the post text is vastly superior to just showing the post titles.

Would love a version of this on 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.

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.

Is blogging always like that? Always has been.

Making it too easy invites spam.

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

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?

Thanks for adding RSS! Bringing Bubbles (and HN) into NetNewsWire is a game-changer for content discovery and keeping a clean reading list.

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 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.

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.

You can find the criteria in the FAQ: https://bubbles.town/faq#sources

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.

try about page, it explains

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).

Because there’s little good about it

Its a scam

> I'm curios why you are avoiding social media?

You make it sound as if that's undesirable.

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.

Same haha

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.

This is the type of thing I have to fight against daily. You already have both action available - left click or middle click. Don't bloat your software with band aids for problems that don't exist - just train your users better.

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

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.

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.

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!

why the downvotes, I meant to demonstrate that I prefer the current behaviour so the site developer knows.

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.

i was wondering where all this traffic was coming from lmao. this is my blog. i actually am not super familiar with JS so i somehow broke my easy-reading mode toggle but usually its there, black background on white text. sorry!!

It runs on Go + sqlite on a Hetzner machine, built from scratch, not a re-skin.

Bug.

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!

The briefing pages also have RSS, this way you see the most relevant stuff https://bubbles.town/editions

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.

> (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).

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

This. Principle of least surprise.

The downvoters meant to demonstrate that they prefer the standard/expected behavior and would like OP to ignore your opinion on the matter.

Next they’ll be defending full screen div paywalls.

I like the new tab as well. Otherwise I will forget what I went to. My process is to go through an interesting site, like HN, and then be able to see these interesting sites after that.

I guess it depends on a persons web workflow though

No worries! It was probably there, I didn't actually look for it. I just figured the colors were part of the vibe you were going for with your blog so I read through it regardless.

Good luck with the convention if you decide to go!

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

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

What type of Hetzner box are you running this on?

Clearly inspired by HN, there are few sites where I have to zoom in to get any kind of readability ;)

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

> 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.

also

https://hckrnews.com

for a slightly different take on the concept

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.

only on a mac, and probably only on safari which leaves the majority of people in the lurch.

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.

?

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

> not a re-skin

Is that something you're frequently accused of, or why the "disclaimer"?

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.

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.

There is still solid and interesting content, it’s just that the material is so diverse that attention is spread thinly. Meanwhile, blogging is the one thing bloggers definitely have in common, so the attention is more concentrated.

It’s a failing of aggregators that they optimize for attention concentration rather than interestingness. But is there even such a thing, objectively?

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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

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!)

wow, always right clicked then clicked open in new tab. Middle click now saves me one click - thanks!

Consolidating your online activity to a single ID is a bug.

1. It enables correlation, tracking, and stalking across sites.

2. It makes people vulnerable to being locked out of that single-ID provider.

3. It makes people vulnerable across multiple services to a compromise of that single-ID provider.

4. It risks alleged abuse at any one service relying on the single-ID provider causing problems with other services, or the SIDP itself. Reputation attacks, Joe Jobs, and the like become attack vectors.

5. In the specific case of Apple, the represented population is small enough that sites relying on it would exclude a huge number of people, if there were no other alternatives.

I'm of an age and from a time in which one didn't use one's real name online, with very rare exceptions, and in which compartmentalising activities into different independent services. Service consolidation, where a small set of ogolopolistic actors snap up previously independent companies, and then decide to forcibly integrate those services, is yet another problem. One of the highest-voted HN submissions I've been associated with was my own report of this happening, 13 years ago, on Google+: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731>. (The submission was by @davidgerard, but was based on my own G+ experience.) The original G+ content is archived here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20120118044728/https://plus.goog...>. NB: the discussion on that thread is quite interesting.

Relevance being I've been following this practice for a long time. Well before the G+ post mentioned as well.

The backstory on that post: not only had Google integrated previously independent G+ and YouTube accounts, but it did so based on email address, often linking real-name and pseudonymous accounts. Several people found themselves outed in different, and more significant ways, including revealing personal, social, political, or other aspects with public and professional accounts.

I'd already preempted this to a large extent by acting when I first heard the "Google+ is an identity network" comment by then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt to NPR reporter Andy Carvin in an impromptu and unscheduled interview, in 2011. I deleted the several-weeks-old personally-identifying G+ account, and employed my "dredmorbius" persona to create a new account.

See "Google+ is an identity service, says Schmidt" <https://www.marketplace.org/story/2011/08/29/google-identity...> based on the G+ account by Carvin, archived here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20111015105327/https://plus.goog...>.

Online identifiers serve multiple purposes. I don't mind having a persistent identity as "dredmorbius" or occasionally "Doc Edward Morbius" (I've deliberately avoided using "Dr." for some time to avoid falsely claiming any unwarranted credentials). But where I don't care to have that association made, I have, or create, other independent aliases.

My general feeling is that ID systems should be at a minimum-viable-level basis, and largely a separate consideration from another often-conflated aspect, reputation.

They were directly answering the post above which asked if it's a re-skin.

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.

Not really, I just picked it up from the initial question from stakhanov.

The comment they were replying to specifically asked if it was a re-skin.

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

viermalbe: Done! Thank you.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

Ah yes of course, finally paid the price of reading comments in isolation. Thanks and sorry :)

Here is the response from Bubbles:

From: Benjamin Behnke <ben@viermal.be> 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 than one or two posts per day on average. Bubbles is for writers, not content machines. I hope you'll understand. Let me know if you plan to slow down :)

Cheers, Ben

Wrong again.

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

XHTML ftw :)

No worries :)