Bubbles, and the old web

I spotted Bubbles in my basic referrers this morning, and my heart lit up. A little directory, surfacing blog posts from actual bloggers, what in the old web is going on?! This isn’t the first time I’ve spotted a resurgence in indie / ‘old’ web stuff lately. Personal sites are making a comeback, bloggers are taking to their keyboards again, web rings and cliques and other 90s nostalgia links are doing the rounds on reddit and bluesky. But why did this stuff fade out in the first place? I think Bubbles sums up what went wrong quite aptly on their About page: 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. Hard to find the motivation to create, write, and share if you’re endlessly screaming into a gigantic void with nobody to answer back. I welcome this new phase of the internet. I’ve missed browsing my blogroll, dropping comments on random blog posts written by…