Two days ago, in my article where I talk about genAI comments and human, messy art, I briefly mentioned a new community-driven aggregator for independent personal blogs called Bubbles.town, with blog posts ranked by votes and freshness and shaped by users. Think Hacker News or Reddit, but exclusively for the indie blogosphere. You sign in with a Fediverse account to vote, and posts bubble up based on community upvotes combined with recency. It has categories like Writing, Tech, Culture, Life, Science, History, Gaming, etc., and recently added a daily "Briefing" that presents top posts in a newspaper-style format. Little did I know that there was discourse and controversy about this project being discussed on the 32-bit Café forum. There was criticism from the outset, my good friend Coyote stating that "[i]f their criteria [for good blog posts] involve Reddit-style popularity contests then I expect we have different priorities." Bubbles.town taking people's blog posts and essentially…
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This is it ...
> The human web certainly doesn't require perfection, just honesty when we fall short.
Wow there seems to be a lot of hate for the idea that bots scraped open blogs. Sure, you may not want your blog being fed into an LLM that could potentially train on it. You even added it to robots.txt and put on a blocker! If bubbles could read your site anyway, so could any AI company.
But whatever, I'm loving the project and I think the new Bayesian model is pretty cool, and way less intensive. I'm glad this project exists. I've shared it with my friends and they're following it