Bubbles
I was tipped off on the bearblog trending page about Bubbles, a fun new site for discovering good blogs in the indieweb space. It's sort of like Hacker News for small blogs. It automatically adds posts from a variety of sources and then sorts by upvote.
The one major shortcoming of the smallblog movement is discovery. It's often slow and manual. In my shift away from traditional social media, I have had to slowly build up a list of sites I read regularly. Things like the discovery feed at bearblog and the Kagi smallweb portal help with that but often it's hard to tell what is the best and what I should skip.
I like something like Bubbles to help surface the best things that I might be missing and to find new writers I might enjoy. My only worry is the risk of this slowly becoming an algorithmic feed like all the others. If it is just upvotes feeding into the sorting and no "engagement" maximization happens, that would be amazing. Any time there is an number, though, human nature drives us to make the number go up. Even when they are just internet points, people want to be at the top of the leaderboard. I hope it stays the way it is.
Note: As if on cue, the site went down as I was writing this. Guess I wasn't the only one tipped off about it today. 😀