bubbles.town
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Bubbles.town is an aggregator service for personal blogs that allows people to upvote posts, similar to Hacker News or Lobsters.
Criticism
Use of LLMs
- 2026-04-23: via Mastodon, the labeling of posts was being done with large language models.
- In an interview with
Brennan Brown, the developer confirmed and apologized for the initial use of LLMs, and that data no longer leaves the server: - 2026-04-27 Brennan Brown: Floating Up: An Interview with the creator of Bubbles.town, Benjamin Behnke (archived)
"There are no API calls to Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other AI provider from the Bubbles server today. Categorisation runs through a small local Naive Bayes model that I have trained on the categorisation Claude did previously. That took some time to set up. The trained vocabulary is published at bubbles.town/classifier/model_en.json and bubbles.town/classifier/model_de.json so anyone can download it and see exactly what the classifier knows. Since yesterday, no data leaves the Bubbles server!"
- 2026-04-08 Bubbles.town thread at the 32-Bit Cafe Forum
Competitive Ranking System
- 2026-07-25
Coyote: Bubbles is a New Way of Recreating Old Problems - 2026-06-16 : fediverse post
Hot take: I think things like bubbles.town are bad for the #indieweb, #smallweb, #boringweb, #blogosphere or whatever you want to call it.
That ranking mechanism is just a drop in replacement for any other sorting/scoring algorithm.
I am seeing many posts very obviously doing "optimizations" like publishing replies to the top posts, using similar titles or talking about the same topics...
This is introducing the toxic incentive to try to rise to the top of the list and I hate it.