About 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 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.

The formula

Score = (1 + Votes × 25) / (EffectiveAge + 2) ^ 1.4

25 = fixed weight per vote. Comments are intentionally excluded from the ranking: a back-and-forth between two users can inflate comment counts without reflecting wider interest. Votes are capped at one per person and are therefore a cleaner signal.

EffectiveAge = hours since last vote, but never less than 50% of the post's actual age. This means a vote gives older posts a boost without completely resetting their clock.

1.4 = gravity. Lower than Hacker News (1.8), so posts stay visible longer, but high enough that stale entries eventually make room for fresh ones.

Participating

You log in with a Fediverse account (Mastodon, Pixelfed, GoToSocial, and others). If you don't have one, mastodon.social is free and takes two minutes.

Vote on posts you enjoy. Over time, your personal Favourite Blogs list builds itself from your voting history. When you find a blog you want to keep up with, follow it. Your My feed then shows new posts only from blogs you follow.

Comments live on the Fediverse. Every post on Bubbles has a corresponding post on @bubbles@social.bubbles.town. Reply to it and your comment shows up here. See the FAQ for details on supported platforms and how comments work.

Feeds and data

Bubbles publishes RSS feeds for every view. The full list of blogs is available as plain text and OPML.

We store your Fediverse handle, your votes, and which blogs you follow. No emails, no passwords, no tracking. We use Plausible for cookieless analytics, self-hosted on a server in Germany. Our dashboard is public. See the FAQ for more on privacy.

Who made this

Ben, from Mülheim, Germany. I wanted something like Hacker News for the non-tech internet, so I built it. Find me on the Fediverse at @viermalbe@troet.cafe. If you want to support the project, here's how.