Bubbles
I’ve been seeing mentions of bubbles.town around the space the past few days. This is essentially an aggregator of blog posts from a large but vetted list of sites, and includes the ability to vote and comment on these posts. The most-liked are featured for a bit, in a style similar to Reddit.
Generally, I think this is neat. There are enough sources to have a handful of new posts every hour or so; it’s nice to be able to duck into when I’m bored and need a quick distraction. One of the stipulations is that sites are removed if they average more than one or two posts a day, which strikes me as a good limitation. You can’t ever ensure a baseline of quality with these sorts of things, but this helps.
I won’t say I’m fully in love with the implementation. I think the ability to “favorite” blogs and see only posts from those you follow might eventually lead to popular voices being followed more and thus being upvoted more, crowding out interesting posts from less-popular sources. Which kind of feels against the spirit of it all. Of course, you’ll first need to sign in if you want to be able to vote; the only way you can do this is via a Fediverse account. Which… ugh. I understand they don’t want to have to manage usernames and passwords—I don’t want to either—but again, ugh. No thanks. If I want to follow a site I’ll just subscribe to their RSS feed.
But anyway, overall an interesting idea, and something I’ll probably keep coming back to every once in a while.