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Bubbles dev here, thanks for the mention
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.
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.

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.
Ah, this reminds me of StumbleUpon.
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!).
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.

> 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.
If anti-racism is hilarious to you, then yes please do us both a favor and stay away from bubbles.
Oh, great, I can log in with my GoToSocial instance to comment and vote! I will definitely add this site alongside my HN addiction :)
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.

(comment deleted)
This is it!! I can finally leave reading comments on hn or get bamboozeled by ai posts masquerading as something technical
It would be great if this supported federation as a Lemmy community, given that Lemmy already has votes.
> "5011 independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you."

That line is so claude.

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.
I like it, but shouldn't this be part of "Show HN"?
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.

thanks for recommending kagi small web, just going through their random posts page i've already seen lots of nice stuff on there
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.
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.

Search doesn’t seem to work.
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?

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