Praise for blog aggregators

As much as I love my Miniflux setup, I’ve also come to appreciate some indie blog aggregators. They are especially handy when I feel like breaking out of my own bubble and/or getting the occasional serendipity dose to discover new blogs to follow.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list in alphabetical order:

(i) Aggregation of blogs, acts as poor man’s RSS feed readers that someone else manages:

• Blog Surf, by DKB: See about.
• Diff Blog: See FAQ.

(ii) Article submission websites, where their users can submit articles which are then upvoted (or not) by other users (wisdom of the crowds):

• Hacker News. You probably know this one already. The /best page should yield a higher SNR¹. Alternatively, to consume the best of hacker news directly in your RSS feed, you can use something like HNRSS to filter out all submissions below a certain threshold.
• Lobsters. See about. Lobsters is basically a more niche version of Hacker News. One distinctive feature is that new users can only join if they are invited by another user².

And for completeness I’ll also mention Reddit but everyone already knows it at this point.