Bubbles

Somewhere out there, someone wrote a really good blog post today. You'll probably never find it. Google won't show it to you. Social media buried it under engagement bait.

Bubbles tries to surface it. Community voting applied to thousands of personal, independent blogs, with identity and discussion routed through the Fediverse.

Why Bubbles

Hacker News and Lobste.rs have community voting figured out, but non-tech content gets drowned by the tech majority. Kagi Small Web curates thousands of personal sites, but has no community-driven ranking. Blog directories help you find blogs, not today's best blog post. Social platforms own the conversation. Mastodon is decentralized and ad-free, but you only see what the people you follow share. RSS is great, but solitary. There's no collective signal telling you what's worth reading today.

Bubbles fills that gap. We're part of the IndieWeb ecosystem, one small piece in a larger picture.

How it works

We monitor thousands of independent, personal blogs via RSS. Every new post appears on Bubbles automatically. Nobody submits individual links.

The blogs were hand-picked from various curated sources and individually reviewed. More details on our inclusion criteria are in the FAQ. You can also check whether a blog is already listed.

You vote on the posts worth reading. The good stuff floats to the top. Everything else sinks over time.

When you click a title, you leave Bubbles. You land on the actual blog, see the author's design, explore their other posts. We will never build reading views or anything else that keeps you from visiting the blog itself. The whole point is to send you there.

Three views: Top (ranked by votes and freshness), New (every post as it comes in), and Hot (where people are talking right now).

Ranking

The front page is shaped by two things: votes and time. Every post starts equal. Your votes decide what rises. A single vote has real weight.

Older posts can resurface when they receive fresh votes, but a single vote on a week-old post won't catapult it above genuinely new content. The ranking favors fresh engagement on new posts over historical votes.