Hubski is a new social aggregation site for thoughtful interaction and sharing of personal or online content.

Hubski’s founders Mark Katakowski and Steven Clausnitzer describe Hubski to be “a social aggregator with a twist.” Unlike other social or news aggregators, Hubski is decentralized. Posts don’t compete for space on shared community pages, but instead are sent to the feeds of users that follow the post’s author or tag.

For example, when you post something on Hubski, your post appears in the feeds of everyone that follows you. If your followers like your post, they can share it with everyone that follows them. As a result, posts spread across the Hubski community by sharing and re-sharing.

Katakowski says that Hubski’s design addresses a problem common to news aggregators: “When posts appear on a page that is shared by many people, the number of posts that can be seen is limited; as a result, competition ensues. To get attention, people tend to post bombastic content and give their posts silly titles. On Hubski, post popularity is people-based, not page-based. Hubski is more a platform than it is a place or a forum. You get what you want, and you don’t get what you don’t want. There’s less competition to it.”

Hubski also has some other functions that set it apart from its peers: User names are color-coded based on the user’s following relationships, and users can “shout-out” to each other in posts and comments, which lets the recipient know when they have been mentioned.

Katakowski says: “Our goal is to enable people to build relationships and to let community emerge as a result. Community is not a thing, it’s something you do.” In addition, instead of showing vote counts, the popularity of a post or a comment is indicated by the number of circles that appear around a “hubwheel”.

Katakowski and Clausnitzer began working on Hubski last spring, but say that it took its final form just two months ago. “We already have a vibrant and active community, and very cool people are rolling in everyday. We couldn’t be happier about where we are at.”, says Clausnitzer.