I always thought the "planets"[1][2][3] were a neat idea. I wish there were more of them for dedicated topics. Then I can just subscribe to specific planets which pulls curated feeds from various blogs on that topic.
Love this! I very much appreciate the inclusion of a lightweight version, as I think lightweight discovery for blogs and the small web is where good tools and apps are needed.
Also, given that the lightweight version is very hn styled format it naturally leads my brain to imagining a version with upvotes and commenters (which may be a good or a bad thing) but with the link submission part automated. Not necessarily the intent here but it was the first time that particular combination of possibilities occurred to me as a way to do things.
Also curious about how these blogs are indexed/reviewed. Is the list ever pruned over time due to inactivity?
Thank you. The initial list was from blogroll.org (mentioned in the about page, and I emailed the person who built that). From then on, I review every submission that happens via the form.
The scheduler flags blogs that fail and doesn't try to fetch after a few tries. I'm still working on an effective way to re-review and prune. Open to any feedback.
I suppose my dream would be that the protocolization of this from back in the day gets revived in some way. Like a google pagecrawl style index built up from blogrolls (though I don't know if the blogroll itself was ever literally protocol-ized), combined with some checking of RSS feeds for activity. Or webrings, or something else.
Though in some respects these are less smart than what you're already doing, but I would like to think there's an elegant way to make an index emerge organically to minimize the editorial burden of any one person.
Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this, both of which I remember well. That's not a criticism! I guess that the quality-drop in search wasn't quite enough to make it happen, but the advent of AI content predomination will be.
> Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this
One of these hand-curated blog aggregator websites pops up on HN about every month. They're cool and good on the author for trying to solve the problem, but it seems like the wrong approach to me. They're too disorganized, a random collection of mostly tech- and politics-related writing from random people with zero way to vet the quality of the writing. They also require the creator/owner to care about the project for the long-term, which is unlikely. I never revisit the aggregators.
I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Maybe a clever person could come up with some kind of higher-tech version that could present a more interesting & consistent interface to users, encourage blogs to link back to each other, and also solve the dead-link problem.
I like the idea of tree curation. People view the branch of their interest. Anyone can submit anything to any point but are unlikely to be noticed if they submit closer to the trunk. Curated lists submit their lists to curators closer to the trunk.
The furthest branches have the least volume (need filters to stop bulk submission to all levels, but still allow some multi submission). It allows curators to contribute in a small field. They then submit their preferred items to the next level up. If that curator likes it they send it further. A leaf level curator can bypass any curator above but with the same risk of being ignored if the higher level node receives too much volume.
You could even run fully AI branches where their picks would only make all the way up by convincing a human curator somewhere above them of the quality. If they don't do a good job they would just be ignored. People can listen to them direct if they are so inclined
I think we're going to reinvent Google's "circles" mechanism from G+. We all (well, the terminally online, at least) are going to be part of several more or less overlapping villages, and the people in those villages are going to trust each other to not be bad faith actors. Everything else... everything that tries to scale... everything public... wasteland.
Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.
Interesting. Each time I think about how we could reboot the (social) web I have this on mind. I don't want exposure to everything, so kind of whitelisting the contacts/peoples/blogs is the first thought.
I guess it could work to carve your own cozy echo chamber that once in a while lets something new in.
The conflict I cannot penetrate is that some things (could) need a larger exposure surface. I.e. OS projects, maintainers that will naturally generate a large following. There are also individuals that want to maximize exposure, mostly for the sake of it. The latter could be neglected but the former not. That leaves an natural backdoor to turn any networking into the same cesspools we have right now.
I am not sure, maybe we have to subdue to the fact that a massive focus on a single thing will turn out into something bad. Considering the importance of Linus Torvalds to the software world, it can even work. He isn't really digitally socialized in a "modern" sense and he still is networked enough to manage an high impact project. Sure he is networked via the linux ecosystem, but that walls him away from direct interactions with the general public.
> people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Imho this is better at the blog post level of granularity. Sometimes I will like someone's writing style, much more often I will be interested in topical recommended reading.
I think a web ring combined with some kind of web of trust style system would be nice. Ideally they could be both centralized where an initial creator holds the keys to what's allowed and decentralized where it just sort of exists. I haven't quite been able to sketch out a reasonable way to keep sites persistent and consistent except DNS records, though. DNS of course making it hard or impossible for smaller and less tech-savvy creators while also having it's own issues regardless.
I'm a big web ring person though so I might be biased and trying to use a hammer in place of a screwdriver.
Couldn't you technically crawl all these blogs for their "blog's I'm reading" and create a social graph? You could start vetting based on how often other blogs link to that one, sort of like an impact factor in research.
It's a good question, and I think worth trying to answer. I think the key thing is that discovery is derived from a curated index rather than social link posting and voting, and the darwinian race to the bottom/popularity/campaigning that drives link aggregators is replaced by a more deliberate human curation with all of its good and bad. You find new things, you feel a slower pace, but maybe get bored more frequently too.
> I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
I have been doing this by linking my linkhut profile with either my profile picture (I used to) or just mentioning it in comments like I am doing right now
https://ln.ht/~imafh , Although not really entirely to blogs, I have this place to recommend cool musicians,projects,links that I have found and I write a short note in all of them as to why I really liked the link. But with tags you can especially have a #blog #webring and use linkhut with notes feature
What do you think about linkhut, I had submitted it to hackernews as a submission after finding it but there wasn't really much traction to it, I am not going to lie when I say this when this feature really resonated with me so much.
I hope more people come to know about linkhut, I hope I am doing my part in making people know about it :)
Similarly, I feel like book publishers are about to become a thriving business soon again. With any book being most likely just a bot creation, trusting "Random House" sounds like a thing more of us will start paying attention to to make sure we're buying a human made thing.
I follow awesome lists. These are curated lists of software. It reverts google indexing, because search is awful.
About personal blogs... I have many many personal blogs in my repository. Around 4k. Respository below. The real problem is to find quality stuff.
You can have millions of them, but if they are not worth my time, then what is the point?
I cannot verify and decide what is good manually.
Obviously.
I think we cannot also rely on Google to provide rating, nor any corporation.
So I have my own ratings, because at least I will be able to find what I found worth before.
I've come to the conclusion that Hacker News is the best aggregator out there. Substack knows my interests yet gives terrible recommendations. Youtube constantly recommends the same videos or exaggerates my interest in a topic based on a few views, spamming me with related content until I watch something unrelated. The only downside of Hacker News is that its focus is narrower than other sites. But perhaps because the focus is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" there is a bias towards things I find interesting with less noise than more commercial offerings.
Very clean site, well done. I’ve built something similar, but it also has an algorithmic front page option as well based on the “standard” algorithm from Reddit/HN: https://engineered.at
I also have it wired up to gpt nano for topic extraction and summary creation per post, if you register for an account (free) you can also follow sources and topics to fine tune things.
I have a big list of features to continue adding to it, like an ability to “claim” your site so you can get some analytics from the site, and potentially to boost your site in the algorithm. Might also add a jobs board.
This is great, thanks! It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing. I'm always up for that, and plan on spending plenty of time exploring the list.
>It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing
I don't know that I've heard a better description of the thing the so-called small web is about than that. It's the clearest answer to the "why" of having a small web of discoverable personal blogs and sites.
Very nice, this is great! Love that you give the two UX options.
FYI (bug report): In the non-minimal version, navigating by category is janky in FireFox. The logo briefly disappears with the nav jumping up in its place every time you click a category.
That's great. I wish we could convince more people to use similar tools regularly, myself included.
It may not 'scale' as well as algorithmic feeds, but maybe that's what will save the Web. We need more sweat and passion, both in curation of content and in the effort to find it.
This is great. But I’ve bookmarked at least 10 of these aggregators over the years, and I never revisit any of them. Partly because I don’t have the time to browse and discover new content.
I also don’t read the blog spam from prolific writers who pop up here every two days, especially the low-quality ones constantly yapping about AI. So the number of blogs I revisit is a handful, and I have a page on my site listing them [1]. Some of the blogs I’ve listed also have backlinks to my site. It’s super simple and works fairly well for me. Plus there’s rss.
It's refreshing to to see something intentionally uncurated.
I think "low quality" content has it's place. A lot of my favourite blogs back in the day could be considered "low quality", but for whatever reason I liked them and read their stuff... Same was true of my own blog. It wasn't particularly high quality but back then even a lowish quality blog would still occasionally be surfaced on Google if the right key words were searched for.
I miss this about modern YouTube too... I used to love watching content from small creators even if their content was "lower quality", but it's so hard to discover that type of content today.
Everywhere you go there is an algorithm pushing you towards larger and more professional creators. And that can be fine, but it's nice to have some balance.
Great feedback. I will add search to this minimal version. The non-minimal version comes with search. Filter by language is something neither has and will be a great addition.
Question, is this strictly chronological, or is there anything at all to make this an "algorithmic feed" like HN, reddit, twitter, or facebook? (list is roughly in the order of less shitty to more shitty, but note that none of them are chronological, unlike, say, a RSS reader aggregating some set of blogs)
Appreciate it :) I don't have one. This is hosted on Cloudflare as a static site and a cron that runs on a $5 VM (that also hosts other things). So it doesn't cost me much to keep it alive other than the domain cost. I built it this way intentionally so that I can keep this running forever.
Great work, I haven't updated my public site in years while I waited for the LLM stuff to play out, but you've inspired me to put it back out there and submit.
Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!
Thank you. I wanted to mostly stay away from algorithmic feed to stay true to RSS. On the non-minimal version of the site, you can sign up and follow blogs to have a "For You" tab, but it's still recent posts from blogs you follow.
If you're referring to comments on the website, I plan to keep it minimal (the text version is a static site).
If you're referring to comments on blogs in general, I have many thoughts. Back in the day, comments used to be how you connected with people and let other people find you. It also came with spam (spam plugins could only do so much).
With the rise of static site generators, most people don't have comments on their blogs now. It is something I miss though.
I haven’t had comments on my blog for over a decade now and I don’t miss them. For every useful and informative comment I got several spammy or rude reply. Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media.
I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.
Yes, unfortunately spam and rude replies come with comments. I also don't have comments on my blog. I instead have one of those email masking services that allows to people to email me (and I have found this effective).
I just hope if you can add dark-mode, I use hackernews essential which adds dark mode and more features which I really like in hackernews, Perhaps something like this can be added but overall I really like it!
You have (essentially) just made something which I imagined 2 years ago:
My point, which has only grown to an even larger degree is that Hackernews has too many AI discussions, which both feels a bit fomo to me and also I am seeing AI generated blog posts and comments now on Hackernews as well.
At some point, I want a website where I can talk about the more human aspects, some occasional AI mention is fine but not if a quarter or half of front page is hackernews and some genuinely nice projects don't get the attention :(
I had joined hackernews to read those content pieces and fell in love with the human discussion aspect but now there are definitely moments of browsing hackernews which makes me feel as to what I had written in the ask HN
my last line within the ask HN was: I just want people who don't want the latest ai hype to gather around and discuss some other cool things which are "not" AI. This kind of fits into that
Adding my submissions of blog-posts into it in sometime :) See you there!
Thank you. I approved your blog. Quick note: It looks like your feed items don't have published date which makes it hard to store and sort recent posts.
I would recommend deleting it, reading up on fascism and psychology and trying to fix whatever makes you prone to extremism in a different way that radicalism and hate.
I wonder how to deal with the growing number of bots on HN. Right now, they are easy to spot, but they're getting better (and maybe I just think I can spot them because of the obvious examples).
Maybe a "this is a bot" button, but no doubt that would be abused.
[1] Planet Gnome: https://planet.gnome.org/
[2] Planet Debian: https://planet.debian.org/
[3] Planet GNU: https://planet.gnu.org/
Also, given that the lightweight version is very hn styled format it naturally leads my brain to imagining a version with upvotes and commenters (which may be a good or a bad thing) but with the link submission part automated. Not necessarily the intent here but it was the first time that particular combination of possibilities occurred to me as a way to do things.
Also curious about how these blogs are indexed/reviewed. Is the list ever pruned over time due to inactivity?
The scheduler flags blogs that fail and doesn't try to fetch after a few tries. I'm still working on an effective way to re-review and prune. Open to any feedback.
Though in some respects these are less smart than what you're already doing, but I would like to think there's an elegant way to make an index emerge organically to minimize the editorial burden of any one person.
One of these hand-curated blog aggregator websites pops up on HN about every month. They're cool and good on the author for trying to solve the problem, but it seems like the wrong approach to me. They're too disorganized, a random collection of mostly tech- and politics-related writing from random people with zero way to vet the quality of the writing. They also require the creator/owner to care about the project for the long-term, which is unlikely. I never revisit the aggregators.
I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Maybe a clever person could come up with some kind of higher-tech version that could present a more interesting & consistent interface to users, encourage blogs to link back to each other, and also solve the dead-link problem.
The furthest branches have the least volume (need filters to stop bulk submission to all levels, but still allow some multi submission). It allows curators to contribute in a small field. They then submit their preferred items to the next level up. If that curator likes it they send it further. A leaf level curator can bypass any curator above but with the same risk of being ignored if the higher level node receives too much volume.
You could even run fully AI branches where their picks would only make all the way up by convincing a human curator somewhere above them of the quality. If they don't do a good job they would just be ignored. People can listen to them direct if they are so inclined
Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.
I am not sure, maybe we have to subdue to the fact that a massive focus on a single thing will turn out into something bad. Considering the importance of Linus Torvalds to the software world, it can even work. He isn't really digitally socialized in a "modern" sense and he still is networked enough to manage an high impact project. Sure he is networked via the linux ecosystem, but that walls him away from direct interactions with the general public.
I think OpenRing does that? [1]. Not my blog, just linking for illustration, but you can see how it looks here at the bottom of the page: https://drewdevault.com/2020/02/06/Dependencies-and-maintain...
[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
Imho this is better at the blog post level of granularity. Sometimes I will like someone's writing style, much more often I will be interested in topical recommended reading.
I'm a big web ring person though so I might be biased and trying to use a hammer in place of a screwdriver.
I have been doing this by linking my linkhut profile with either my profile picture (I used to) or just mentioning it in comments like I am doing right now
https://ln.ht/~imafh , Although not really entirely to blogs, I have this place to recommend cool musicians,projects,links that I have found and I write a short note in all of them as to why I really liked the link. But with tags you can especially have a #blog #webring and use linkhut with notes feature
What do you think about linkhut, I had submitted it to hackernews as a submission after finding it but there wasn't really much traction to it, I am not going to lie when I say this when this feature really resonated with me so much.
I hope more people come to know about linkhut, I hope I am doing my part in making people know about it :)
About personal blogs... I have many many personal blogs in my repository. Around 4k. Respository below. The real problem is to find quality stuff. You can have millions of them, but if they are not worth my time, then what is the point?
I cannot verify and decide what is good manually. Obviously.
I think we cannot also rely on Google to provide rating, nor any corporation.
So I have my own ratings, because at least I will be able to find what I found worth before.
Link to my repo:
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
I also have it wired up to gpt nano for topic extraction and summary creation per post, if you register for an account (free) you can also follow sources and topics to fine tune things.
I have a big list of features to continue adding to it, like an ability to “claim” your site so you can get some analytics from the site, and potentially to boost your site in the algorithm. Might also add a jobs board.
If you’re interested, while this site is closed source, the feed monitoring rails engine is open source: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
The lists are impenetrable for my eye, I think an key mistake is that you don't use an accent color for titles in lists (i.e. look at a google serp).
That you don't directly link the content, felt like an offense, followed by a slap in the face looking at an AI generated summary.
The layout feels too reddit and too industrialized and the way you plan to progress the project, rings my "pet project to slam ad's on" bells.
I think the pure intent of OPs site naturally makes it more approachable and likeable.
I’ve submitted mine as well - cheers!
I don't know that I've heard a better description of the thing the so-called small web is about than that. It's the clearest answer to the "why" of having a small web of discoverable personal blogs and sites.
FYI (bug report): In the non-minimal version, navigating by category is janky in FireFox. The logo briefly disappears with the nav jumping up in its place every time you click a category.
It may not 'scale' as well as algorithmic feeds, but maybe that's what will save the Web. We need more sweat and passion, both in curation of content and in the effort to find it.
I also don’t read the blog spam from prolific writers who pop up here every two days, especially the low-quality ones constantly yapping about AI. So the number of blogs I revisit is a handful, and I have a page on my site listing them [1]. Some of the blogs I’ve listed also have backlinks to my site. It’s super simple and works fairly well for me. Plus there’s rss.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/blogroll/
And, possibly a way to filter type of content more in-depth than just one category?
I think "low quality" content has it's place. A lot of my favourite blogs back in the day could be considered "low quality", but for whatever reason I liked them and read their stuff... Same was true of my own blog. It wasn't particularly high quality but back then even a lowish quality blog would still occasionally be surfaced on Google if the right key words were searched for.
I miss this about modern YouTube too... I used to love watching content from small creators even if their content was "lower quality", but it's so hard to discover that type of content today.
Everywhere you go there is an algorithm pushing you towards larger and more professional creators. And that can be fine, but it's nice to have some balance.
However, I think (text.)Blogosphere has a nicer interface, personally. Maybe I'm just used to HN.
Those who enjoy this might also like:
- https://kagi.com/smallweb
- https://blogroll.org/
- https://minifeed.net/welcome
- https://ooh.directory/
I'd love a search bar and maybe a means to sort by popularity (however you define it.)
I like that it's free and clean and direct; I hope it remains that way!
I hope to see more things like this.
What would be really cool is if there was a personalized algorithm (for you page) that stored data and processed locally.
I wish I could go back and tell them it was nothing compared to what passes for web output in 21st century.
But kudos for different people working on similar good ideas
If you're referring to comments on blogs in general, I have many thoughts. Back in the day, comments used to be how you connected with people and let other people find you. It also came with spam (spam plugins could only do so much).
With the rise of static site generators, most people don't have comments on their blogs now. It is something I miss though.
I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.
But, can they?
But moderation and spam are still the hardest problems indeed.
I just hope if you can add dark-mode, I use hackernews essential which adds dark mode and more features which I really like in hackernews, Perhaps something like this can be added but overall I really like it!
You have (essentially) just made something which I imagined 2 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41789661: Ask HN: Are you interested in a Hacker News alternative which doesnt focus on AI (Oct 9 2024)
My point, which has only grown to an even larger degree is that Hackernews has too many AI discussions, which both feels a bit fomo to me and also I am seeing AI generated blog posts and comments now on Hackernews as well.
At some point, I want a website where I can talk about the more human aspects, some occasional AI mention is fine but not if a quarter or half of front page is hackernews and some genuinely nice projects don't get the attention :(
I had joined hackernews to read those content pieces and fell in love with the human discussion aspect but now there are definitely moments of browsing hackernews which makes me feel as to what I had written in the ask HN
my last line within the ask HN was: I just want people who don't want the latest ai hype to gather around and discuss some other cool things which are "not" AI. This kind of fits into that
Adding my submissions of blog-posts into it in sometime :) See you there!
Submitted my blog.
Can't find it.
> It looks like your feed items don't have published date which makes it hard to store and sort recent posts
Okay, you mean the RSS feed?
https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&limit=50&smallweb=t...
Maybe a "this is a bot" button, but no doubt that would be abused.