There are two versions: Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ Non-minimal: https://blogosphere.app/
If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.
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.
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.
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
That has both caught on, is well-supported by WordPress and lots of other tools since forever, and is notable enough that there's a glossary entry for it on Wikipedia:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogroll>
It's partly why OPML exists.
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 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...
Maybe if you do that for 1000 days some automation can find a pattern in it? I doubt it. Filtering out garbage hundreds of items at a time is definetly doable.
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 don't like counting the number of subscribers, that ends up surfacing things like major news websites, or the hacker news feed. But I've found the graph to be useful in finding recommendations.
The economic incentive is overwhelming to corrupt these signals, either directly (link sharing schemes, upvote rings, bots to like your content) or indirectly (shaping your content itself to have the shape of what will be promoted, regardless of its quality).
What you almost want is to use any of these ideas and hope for it to catch on widely enough in your small niche to be useful, but not so much that it comes an optimization target.
And if you're looking for something specific - "I want to learn category theory" - then you don't visit a small web site because the content you're looking for is probably not on any woefully short, hand-curated list of URLs. So you do a normal web search (or ask your chatbot).
Another problem with web rings is that if you're hopping sites at random, you more often than not end up someplace weird in 3-5 hops. I guess it's the internet version of six degrees of separation: you're always at most six clicks away from neo-Nazis or SEO spammers.
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 :)
This is actually a great idea. The key is to actually continue to do this and not gatekeep and charge money for promoted crap and add algorithms once it seems profitable to do so. If that happens we’re just recreating the wheel!
This will automatically download the OPML file for all the blogs that have an RSS address filed on blogroll.org
There's a bit of everything in there but if what you want is a wild ride maybe you can give that a try.
It seems to be simply a great idea...like...should we bring it back? Could we?
There was some overlap between the webring age and the early search age, but once search became entrenched and useful, webrings faded. Blogrolls survived for a little bit longer, but it was search.
Specifically, once search became the way you found the first page/site to begin with. Before search as default, you found sites in a bunch of scattershot ways: advertisements, word of mouth, lists in books, or lists on websites that updated periodically (that you had to have found/heard about one of the other ways) for example. Then you crawled out from there because that was the only way to find things. You had to either know the URL or use a link. And not all of the links/sites in the webrings were good.
Once search got good enough, people found the initial site via search and instead of taking their time clicking through a webring which might at any point lead them somewhere dead or useless, it was quicker to go back to the search page to find something else.
Page access went from being a chained together web of back and forth links to a 2 step process of search -> page.
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:
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.
If you want to be exceptionally kind, you can also email the submitter and tell them their blog has been removed due to inactivity, so they'll remember to submit if they start blogging again.
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.
But here are some of my fav ways to discover blogs:
It aggregates the top articles on STEAMD topics (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math, and Design) from various forums and displays them in chronological order.
This includes forums like Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, Slashdot, Bear, and some science, tech & programming related subreddits.
You can read more here:
[1] Planet Gnome: https://planet.gnome.org/
[2] Planet Debian: https://planet.debian.org/
[3] Planet GNU: https://planet.gnu.org/
Ctrl-F for planet: https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/
There's an older list at https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplan...
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.
Those who enjoy this might also like:
and https://slashpages.net is also a nice way to discover new blogs...
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 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 getting hard to keep up with all the recent posts on indie web aggregators (a good problem to have!). I've observed that I always get excited about seeing one such tool -> try to make it a habit to visit those aggregators occasionally -> forget about them -> rinse and repeat.
A great execution on the problem of discovery within the blogosphere is Wander, which was posted here a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422759. I discover great, small websites not because I found them in any aggregator's list, but more often via someone whose opinions I trust recommended a particular post to me. Wander executes on that idea rather brilliantly.
I've found myself going to my Wander console[^1] more regularly now and I keep finding great folks to follow.
I just spent at least 30 minutes reading instead of mindless scrolling. This reminded me of the good feelings I had when I first used the web. The content is novel and written for the authors enjoyment. The web was better for people then and you just recreated that.
I like the minimal version better, but it is hard to use on mobile. If there was a way that you could make a minimal version with better accessibility and larger fonts, I’d use that. Until then, I’ve bookmarked the modern version.
It's time we bring back webrings and optional auto-check for recip links - with options to check for nofollow and do a thing or not.
Webring code anyone can self host - have notification and approval and accept nofollow links as okay by default should work fine.
Thinking of them getting bigger, might need to give surfers and option to sort by tags / categories / newest / oldest. have option for website owner to prioritize or highlight a few as first seen each month..
Discovery still remains a problem - besides this post on HN how do you plan to get people to visit the site and discover new posts?
I started a newsletter to help with this, but keen to hear ideas.
That said, it got its list of feeds from the repo that someone made which hasn't been updated in a few years, so even if new blog content gets pulled, the list of blogs doesn't change. Oh well, wasn't a super serious project.
However, I think (text.)Blogosphere has a nicer interface, personally. Maybe I'm just used to HN.
We have something similar — asort of “planet” — for personal blogs in Brazil. It's open source, maybe it can be useful for someone: https://github.com/manualdousuario/lerama
Our instance: https://lerama.pcdomanual.com
Could you add a form submission button next to the filter, so that it doesn't require JavaScript? (Or actually that can probably be done easily enough with some kind of CSS variable-setting trick...?)
My Minifeed [1] started with a similar goal of having a "HN for blogs", but then it grew to include search, related recommendations, custom feeds, lists, etc. I don't have categories though.
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.
I typically use marginalia and wiby to make finding posts from blogs easier, but I like the idea of providing hn style mechanics to blog posts, so many of which lack the ability to comment/discuss the material. At the same time, while I think this is a useful tool, I am a little weary of the aggregation and consolidation of the web.
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.
Writing blogs shouldn't be about marketing and reading blogs shouldn't be about maximizing information density. The vast vast majority of blogs on the old web that everyone yearns to return to weren't "high quality." You were just writing about whatever, likely in a style that would get you downvoted on HN for being insufficiently substantive, and if you were lucky someone else might read it.
I wouldn't even call it "low quality" so much as "non-commercial."
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.
> RSS / Atom Feed URL *
I really need to implement an RSS/Atom feed in my static site generator, the lack of this feature is really starting to hurt. I can probably get Claude to help me with this.
and was pleasantly surprised to see my blog was already on this website!
submitted my own blog there as well. it is cool seeing human-curated directories coming back (not that they truly left, but i've been seeing more and more over the last few years around the 'indie web')
i do a little something like this on my own site, but it is just a simple directory of sites that i like listed by category on a single page.
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'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 wish I could go back and tell them it is nothing compared to what passes for web output in the 21st century.
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?
Almost nobody actually contacts me but it is technically possible.
But kudos for different people working on similar good ideas
Submitted my blog.
https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&limit=50&smallweb=t...
it's like the late 90s early 2000s again
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!
To me, it seems like a poor version of subreddits with HN shell to wash it down.
Maybe a "this is a bot" button, but no doubt that would be abused.
By the way, some minor issues I found:
1. In the minimal version, when browsing the list of blogs I cannot get past page 12. The last page the UI lets me navigate to is https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-12 which shows blogs up to names starting with 'M'. I can reach page 13 by manually editing the URL to https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-13 which shows two blogs starting with 'N'. However, pages 14 and beyond just load the home page. Surely there are more blogs with names starting with 'O', 'P', etc.?
2. The modern version at https://blogosphere.app/ uses infinite scroll, which makes it impossible to reach the footer. Each time I scroll down, more content loads and pushes the footer further away. I was only able to view the footer by modifying the DOM in the browser's developer tools. It would be nice if there were a straightforward way to access the footer.
1. Yeah, there are definitely more blogs. Seems like an issue paginating and fetching it at build time. I will check this. 2. I generally don't prefer infinite scroll but since people are used to it on social media, I kept it on the modern version. It does make it impossible to see the footer. I will figure out a way around this. In the meantime, the "Submit" page should display the footer.
I'm also going to add search to the minimal version since I also prefer it over the modern version and search is useful.