I like a lot of things about bubbles but it seems to surface a lot of negative posts that are mainly just rants. A good chunk of articles in the daily/weekly briefings kind of feel like an indie blogging spin on the negative posts/articles you'd see a lot on microblogging sites.
It regularly surfaces some good stuff so it's working but it's also kind of depressing in ways that made me leave microblogging sites. There regularly is a lot of anti ai rants, USpol rants, the web is dead, defeatist/nihilistic posts etc in the weekly/daily digests. The entire culture section are these types of posts currently.
Makes me wonder if the use of microblogging accounts to log in is partially biasing the userbase towards that kind of writing? I don't have a solution for this though and limiting to fediverse accounts probably has some upsides too.
Ultimately bubbles still gets a big thumbs up from me but I'd love to see these kinds of posts deprioritized a bit. Outside maybe a few deeper more constructive ones that link out well I don't think they represent the best of indie blogging. Anyways if you made it this deep into my ramble I hope you have a nice week.
It's great seeing some more varied takes on search engines like this. That's essentially the same reason I use inoreaders rss search to find articles when I want to revisit them etc and it has been super handy. I know there have been some projects focused on rss search engines like OpenOrb that have some similarities to Hister. Makes me wonder if Hister could seed its history using rss.
For searches where you want more that just the first result and want a depth of results to go through and maybe even check out more than the first page of results I like to use meta-search engines that grab results from multiple sources. Plus it helps route around censorship since you are getting results from a variety of sources. Searxng is the best known one.
I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy.
On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere.
I've been wanting something like this for a while now but as an extension that runs locally. Just something I can click to get a quick response telling me if the article seems like ai so I can focus on the writing without needing to spend energy on remembering ai styles and detecting obvious ai. I'd be pretty happy to see something like that built straight into firefox.
Ultimately slop is so pervasive that I'm wasting a fair amount of time vetting text and it's affecting my ability to simply enjoy reading. I keep getting part way into an article before realizing it's low quality ai writing. Being able to get a quick heads up that it looks like ai before starting would save me a lot of energy even on articles I decide to try reading because it cuts down on mental overhead.
Personally my favorite spiritual successor to stumbleupon has been cloudhiker.net. I found kagis to be too personal blog focused for my tastes. I love that kagi is doing so much of this out in the open though.
It's a good saying but the literal meaning is not entirely correct anymore.
Climate change has changed the math on tree planting in a few ways.
For example tree planting in your area today may backfire vs 30 years ago:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/forest-preservati...
Oh good point I also overlooked that with the anti ai list.
The big anti ai list also seems to be focused on hiding links from ddg/bing/google where this new more focused list just blocks sites. I tend to like block ones vs hiding because they pop up a nice warning no matter where I came from and I can still decide to ignore it if I want so they is more user agency instead of just quietly hiding a unclear chunk of the net from search engines.
Personally I find that I prefer badly written english or auto-translated stuff written in languages foreign to me over ai generated or even just ai polished works I've seen. There is just so much more character, depth and variance there vs ultra ai generic or slop text.
That being said this project seems focused on content farms not people who just need a little help writing so this whole conversation is a bit of a side tangent.
Oh neat! I went and shared this with some Brazilian friends of mine. They tend to like stuff like this so I think it will make them happy.
I know I enjoyed checking out some sites you have in that list (using translation) so thanks!
I love browsing outside the anglosphere but it can be challenging sometimes finding curators that find regular new sites or posts to check out when other languages aren't part of your regular browsing routine.
One other thing people might like about the conversation is that it has a bunch of regional subsections so it isn't overrun by US news like a lot of news sites. Well outside the US section of course. I know I personally appreciate having another source of informed writting that also covers local factors and events.
10tons tends to make smaller scale games and you feel it sometimes but I've had a great time with quite a few of their other shooters too. You used to be able to get this bundle for cheap from fanatical sometimes, not sure if that is still the case. They are best known in the modern era for Tesla vs Lovecraft which doesn't show up in this bundle.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/428/10tons_Shooters/
There have been a few attempts to make open source versions of Crimsonland and I had a good time with Violetland
https://github.com/ooxi/violetland
The kagi smallweb site has an alternative feed that is less high traffic that only includes appreciated (liked) articles. It's not ideal for a lot of people since it's still pretty high traffic and not a lot of users use the main site with the button to appreciate things.
https://kagi.com/smallweb/appreciated
You can find a few alt feeds for the kagi small web by going to the site and clicking the top right rss button. There are ones for videos, code and comics and a link to the full opml file.
https://kagi.com/smallweb
Personally I like the newsminimalist rss feed for simple ai evaluated and summarized news. I don't have much experience with the site itself but it's likely also worth a check. The dev is an active part of hn.
Edit: Actually if you are looking for more things to explore the kagi github has some interesting other stuff like the smallweb page and the opml file of rss smallweb feeds:
It regularly surfaces some good stuff so it's working but it's also kind of depressing in ways that made me leave microblogging sites. There regularly is a lot of anti ai rants, USpol rants, the web is dead, defeatist/nihilistic posts etc in the weekly/daily digests. The entire culture section are these types of posts currently.
Makes me wonder if the use of microblogging accounts to log in is partially biasing the userbase towards that kind of writing? I don't have a solution for this though and limiting to fediverse accounts probably has some upsides too.
Ultimately bubbles still gets a big thumbs up from me but I'd love to see these kinds of posts deprioritized a bit. Outside maybe a few deeper more constructive ones that link out well I don't think they represent the best of indie blogging. Anyways if you made it this deep into my ramble I hope you have a nice week.