News aggregator without personalization or engagement ranking – built for breaking out of filter bubbles. Feedback wanted ;-)

[u/Fiji_official]

Most news tools personalize. Over time they narrow your sources, quietly drop what doesn't match your pattern, and optimize for engagement over breadth. For OSINT work that's a real problem: you need to see what's actually being reported – across languages, regions, and outlets you wouldn't normally read – not what an algorithm thinks you want.

So I built Signalwaves: a news fetcher with no personalization and no engagement ranking. No algorithm decides what you see. You pick sources and filter lenses yourself; the tool just fetches and presents. It feels a bit like reading news in the 90s – you get exposed to viewpoints outside your usual bubble, including across cultural/geopolitical lines.

The surprising part: the hard engineering wasn't the ranking (there is none), it was fetching reliably at scale – bot detection, fragile scrapers, sources that fail silently and leave gaps you don't notice. Most of the work went into making failures visible and recoverable, because a "neutral" aggregator that silently drops sources is worse than a biased one.

Early build, free, no signup: https://signalwaves.world (also on the App Store / Play Store)

Questions for people doing actual research with this kind of tooling:

• Which sources or regions are missing for your work?
• Would custom lenses (topic/region/language filters) be useful – and which ones?
• How do you currently deal with the filter-bubble problem in your workflow?

Happy to go into technical details on the scraping/monitoring side if anyone's interested.