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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
Do you mean the entire .wordpress.com and .blogspot.com are allowed as per the grandparent comment implies, or just individual blogs may or may no be allowed, exactly like substack?
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.
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.
