Posted by ramkarthikk 5 days ago
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.
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.
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."
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.