Yesterday, I mentioned I stumbled upon Bubbles, a Hacker News (if you’re familiar) like site aimed specifically at blogs, with an attempt to capture less-techy content. I’ve been enjoying exploring its different pages.

Bubbles' main page is a “top list” of blog posts, ranked by the number of upvotes, much like Hacker News. The other tabs, “new” and “hot”, let you discover the newest content and the most discussed content (most comments), in that order. Then there’s the “my” tab, which looks like a place to store your own RSS feeds from the lists on Bubbles and possibly elsewhere, but I haven’t used it yet.

Bubbles also has a newsletter-like page for daily and weekly content by topic (you can also choose and filter which topics you want to see throughout the site). All of these sections are available with RSS feeds, so you can get the content from Bubbles directly to your RSS reader (it supports Atom feeds, which proved to be an issue with Inkwell, but there seems to be a way around that).

Then, through Mastodon, I found out about Scrolls. Scrolls is a human-made newsletter by Mike Sass, which features more tech-related news than Bubbles, with a specific focus on the Indieweb, Fediverse, and Cybersecurity, which is more or less my order of interest in these topics. It’s another good place to discover content from other bloggers, and I noticed there’s an overlap between Bubbles and Scrolls - which is not a bad thing.

Then, through one of those tools (or through one of the blogs I added to my list last week? I’m losing track in the best way!) I found out about human.json. This is a novel and interesting project that aims to authenticate human blogs, which reminds me of “the web of trust concept: one human vouches for another human they know, and that human in turn vouches for another, and so on. The idea is for human-made content to be authenticated and recognized, rather than the constant AI Slop.

Honestly, I was a bit unsure of the idea at the start. The web is flooded with people who lift pitchforks for anything related to AI, and while I can understand why, I don’t think one extreme warrants another. Besides, as I’ve indicated a couple of times, I use AI on my blog. Fortunately, this sort of usage is not a problem according to Beto, the creator of this project:

It’s fine to use AI tools that assist you with spellchecking, grammar, formatting, etc. Just make sure to be clear and transparent about how AI is used, and consider publishing an /ai slashpage with your policy.

And you know what…? I think that’s a great idea. I’ll get on top of that. I need to organize my about and the info in my archive page a bit better anyway, so this may be a good opportunity.

All of this Blogorama stuff had me revamp my blogroll, and I have a few more changes in mind… hopefully you’ll see those live soon.