Every morning looked the same for me: dev.to, then Hacker News, then Stack Overflow's hot questions, then Product Hunt, then Lobsters, then — if I had the energy — Mastodon. Six tabs, six different ranking systems, six different "what's hot right now" signals, and no way to tell if the same story was blowing up on more than one of them at once.
So I built TrendHub — a single, unified feed that pulls what's trending across dev.to, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, Product Hunt, Lobsters, and Mastodon, ranks it all on one comparable scale, and lets me read it like one site instead of six.
The problem wasn't that any one of those platforms was bad — it's that trend-checking had become a tax on my attention. This is my attempt to get that time back, and to make it something other developers could use too.
What TrendHub actually does
At its core, TrendHub is a fetch-and-rank pipeline: background jobs pull the latest posts from each source on their own cadence, normalize each post's engagement signal (reactions, points, votes, favourites — whatever that platform measures) onto a common 0–100 trending score, and drop them into one feed you can actually scan in a few minutes.
Features
Unified, ranked feed — every post from every source lands in one timeline, sorted by a trending score instead of by which tab you happened to open first.
Per-platform toggles — don't care about Product Hunt today? Flip it off in the sidebar. Preferences are saved per user, so your feed stays exactly the way you like it.
Search, tags, and time-range filters — searching matches both post titles and tags, and you can restrict the feed to the last day, week, or all time.
Cross-platform duplicate detection — if the same story is trending on both Hacker News and Lobsters at once (which happens more than you'd think), TrendHub tags it "also trending on…" instead of showing it to you twice.
Trending velocity (🔥 rising) — posts don't just get a static score, they get a velocity indicator based on how their score moved since the last fetch, so you can spot what's accelerating, not just what's already popular.
Bookmarks and hide/dismiss — save something to read later, or hide a post you're not interested in. Hidden posts stay hidden until you choose to reveal them again.
Daily digest email — opt in and get a daily rollup of what's trending sent straight to your inbox, no login required to stay in the loop.
Personal RSS feed export — every user gets their own token-based RSS URL, so your filtered, ranked feed can slot into whatever feed reader you already use.
Keyboard shortcuts — j/k to navigate, o to open, b to bookmark, x to hide. Built for people who'd rather not touch the mouse.
Dark mode — because it's a developer tool, and developer tools ship in dark mode.
Per-post share menu — share to X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, WhatsApp, email, or just copy the link, straight from the feed.
Source health panel — a small sidebar panel shows the last fetch time and status per platform, so you always know how fresh the data is (and if a source's API is having a bad day).
Under the hood
TrendHub is built on Laravel 10 + Inertia.js + Vue 3 + Tailwind CSS, with Postgres in production and SQLite for local development. Each source has its own dedicated fetcher class, a scoring service normalizes engagement metrics across wildly different scales (a Hacker News point isn't a Mastodon favourite), and a grouping service handles the cross-platform duplicate matching.
It's deployed on Render, running as a single web service with a managed Postgres database.
Try it
Live: trend-hub-204c.onrender.com
It's running on a free tier, so if it's been quiet for a bit, the first load might take 30–50 seconds to wake back up — that's not a bug, just a cold start. Register an account (it's instant, no email verification loop) and toggle platforms on/off to make it yours.
What's the trend-checking equivalent of "context switching fatigue" in your own workflow — do you have a tool for it, or are you still juggling tabs like I was? Would love to hear what I'm missing.
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