Comment by postalcoder

3 months ago

I just requested access to the database @freediver so hopefully it should be integrated into https://hcker.news soon.

I appreciate Kagi's community-driven approach. The open Small Web list[0] is invaluable. Applying a smallweb filter[1] on HN brings a breath of fresh air to the frontpage.

0: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb

1: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true

10 comments

postalcoder

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chemotaxis  3 months ago

I like the effort, but it's super restrictive. They exclude all of Substack on principle (but weirdly, allow blogspot.com and wordpress.com). They exclude anything that isn't a blog. And they exclude blogs that aren't updated often enough.

The end result is that there's a lot of "small web" stuff that doesn't show up. Looking at my bookmarks, I think 90% of them are in the "small web" category in spirit, but maybe 10% have any chance of appearing on the Kagi list.

  • barnabee  3 months ago

    Substack is definitely outside my idea of what “the small web” means (I realise this isn’t well defined and will mean different things to different people, though).

    It’s a platform and social network of sorts, rather than a neutral hosting provider and it’s too often used in a way that’s inauthentically commercial IMO.

    • chemotaxis  3 months ago

      Note that this is the admission policy for a per-blog whitelist - we're not talking about including *.substack.com as a "good" domain, just allowing someone to propose the inclusion of hacker-bob.substack.com.

      And the policy already allows wordpress.com or blogspot.com (the latter is probably mostly spam nowadays, with a few holdouts who have been using it for 20 years). Also note that Small Web allows YouTube channels under 400k subscribers (!). So it's really not that clean-cut.

      1 reply →

    • immibis  3 months ago

      The social network seems relevant to me. It feels like people are posting for clout, trying to get to as many inboxes as possible, so they post a lot of marketing slop, just like on LinkedIn.

  • postalcoder  3 months ago

    I understand the substack exclusion. The paywall is not user friendly.

    If you don't mind, it'd be cool to take a look at your bookmark domains so that I could potentially augment the filter on my site. If you're interested, my email is in bio.

thefringthing  3 months ago

Is there a simple way to turn a set of hcker.news feed settings into an RSS feed?

  • postalcoder  3 months ago

    Not yet. I've gotten a bunch of requests for it but I haven't scoped it out yet. Could you send me an email? It'll be helpful to have your input.