i’m sympathetic to the premise of bubbles. “non-tech content gets drowned by the tech majority” is something i agree happens with a lot of existing independent web discovery mechanisms, and i’m rooting for any alternatives that are focused on non-tech interests! unfortunately, i’ve checked bubbles every couple of days since this thread was made and i’ve yet to find a single post that interested me…
ethics of the category assignment system aside, i don’t think it works very well! despite the goal of bubbles, the tech majority is still drowning out everything else. as soon as the category checkboxes were added, i deselected “tech”, yet six of the top ten posts i see right now are on tech related topics: a post on AI summaries classified as “writing”, a post on vibe coders as “culture”, a post about working in tech, with tech in the title, as “life”. most of the top posts are meta posts about blogging itself (or worse, about bubbles itself), which i think should be classified as tech! i’d rather read about anything else!
i think it would take a dedicated effort by the whole userbase to actively avoid upvoting tech-related posts for bubbles to work according to it’s initial premise. otherwise, the numbers just don’t add up. all the people i know with fediverse acccounts are interested in tech! sure, they each have additional diverse interests, but an interest in tech is something they all have in common, so tech topics are always going to get the most votes.
it’s possible that bubbles could evolve into something that interests me, but as it stands… eh. i don’t have a fediverse account, and i don’t think it’s worth my time to make one just to try to nudge the site culture in a direction i’m less bored by.