FAQ

General

What is Bubbles?

A community-ranked feed of blog posts from independent, personal blogs. New posts flow in automatically from curated sources. You vote on the good ones. The good stuff bubbles up. The rest pops. Bubbles launched on March 21, 2026.

Who is this for?

Anyone who misses the old web. People who enjoy reading blog posts about things other than startups and JavaScript frameworks. If you've ever fallen down a rabbit hole on someone's personal website and thought "why can't I find more stuff like this?", that's who this is for.

Is this like Reddit?

Structurally, a little. People vote on things. But nobody submits links. Everything comes in automatically from RSS feeds of thousands of curated blogs. There's no self-promotion, no karma farming, no moderators removing your post because it violated rule 7b.

Why "Bubbles"?

Because good writing bubbles up. Because every blog is its own little bubble. Because the front page is ephemeral, like soap bubbles: what shimmers today will be gone tomorrow.

Sources

Where do the blogs come from?

We drew from various curated sources, including ooh.directory, indieblog.page, Bear Blog, blogroll.org, IndieWeb Webring, personalsit.es, and, for the Spanish edition, ¡Blog!¡Blog!. There is no automatic sync with any of these. Blogs newly listed there don't automatically appear on Bubbles.

How do you decide which blogs to include?

Every blog was reviewed individually. We filtered out blogs that are clearly commercial, heavy on ads, only republishing other people's content, or haven't published anything in years. Broken feeds and unreachable servers were skipped as well. What's left is personal, independent writing. Blogs that consistently publish more than one or two posts per day get flagged and removed. Bubbles is for writers, not content machines.

Can I suggest a blog?

Anyone can suggest blogs. First, you can check whether a blog is already listed. If it isn't, send the blog URLs to suggest@bubbles.town and we'll take a look. Before you submit, please check that the blog meets our criteria:

Personal and independent. A private blog written by one person. No company blogs, brand publications, or team newsrooms.
Personal voice. The author writes in their own voice, with opinions and perspective. No neutral reporting, no AI-generated content.
Active. At least one post within the last 12 months.
Moderate pace. Not more than one or two posts per day on average. Bubbles is for writers, not content machines.
Open content. Posts readable by anyone on the public web. No paywalls, no memberships, no gated content. Excerpts in the feed are fine as long as the full article is free to read on the blog.
No ads or commercial focus. Occasional author-run sponsorships are fine. Heavy ad blocks, affiliate farms, or blogs that exist to sell a product are not.
Original writing. No link roundups as the primary output, no pure-repost aggregators, no content scraped from other sites.
Nothing illegal or harmful. No content that is illegal under German or EU law, no harassment, no targeted hate.

If a blog doesn't quite fit these criteria but you think it belongs on Bubbles anyway, submit it with a short explanation why.

My blog doesn't appear on Bubbles. Why?

Your blog may not have met our criteria, or your RSS feed had issues when we last checked. A common reason: your robots.txt tells our bot to stay away (see the next question). If you think something is wrong, email us at feedback@bubbles.town.

How does Bubbles handle robots.txt?

Our fetcher, BubblesBot, reads your robots.txt and follows it. If the file blocks all bots (Disallow: / under User-agent: *), Bubbles does not list your blog. Some platforms ship that rule by default (Bear Blog, Blogspot, certain Wordpress privacy plugins), often without the author noticing.

To let Bubbles in while keeping other bots out, add these two lines as their own block:

User-agent: BubblesBot
Allow: /

User agent, IP addresses and the exact rules are on the BubblesBot page.

Which feed format does Bubbles expect?

RSS, Atom and JSON Feed all work. Each item needs a link, and it should have a title and a publication date. Excerpt and reading time come from the feed, BubblesBot does not read the article pages. Full text or summary is your choice. A feed with titles or short summaries only is listed like any other, but its posts never count as long reads, which start at 1,000 words.

Every item in the feed becomes an entry on Bubbles. If your feed also carries site updates, changelogs or gallery uploads, those show up too, and the posting limit above counts all of them. If your site has a feed for the blog posts alone, send us that one. A short feed with only the newest posts is fine.

Can I see the full list of blogs?

Yes. We publish the complete list of all active blogs: blogs.txt (plain text) and blogs.opml (OPML, importable into RSS readers).

I don't want my blog on Bubbles.

Email us at feedback@bubbles.town and we'll remove it. No questions asked.

Voting and ranking

How does the ranking work?

Two things matter: votes and time. Every post starts equal. Votes push it up, time pulls it down. The full formula is on the about page.

How much does my vote matter?

A lot. A single vote can keep a post on the front page for half a day. Fresh votes have the most impact.

Can I downvote?

No. You can vote something up or not. If a post isn't interesting, it sinks on its own.

Fediverse and accounts

Do I need an account?

To read, no. To vote, you need a Fediverse account.

What's the Fediverse?

A network of connected, independent social platforms. Mastodon is the most popular one. You create a free account on any Fediverse server, and that account works across all of them, including Bubbles.

Why Fediverse and not email/password login?

We don't want to manage accounts. No passwords to store, no emails to verify, no spam accounts to moderate. The Fediverse handles identity for us, and no single company controls it.

I don't have an account. Where do I sign up?

mastodon.social is the largest server. Create a free account, then use it to log in to Bubbles. Takes about two minutes.

Which platforms are supported?

Anything with Mastodon-compatible OAuth: Mastodon, Pixelfed, GoToSocial, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Sharkey, Hometown. Bluesky, Lemmy, and Threads are not supported.

What happened to comments?

Until November 2026, replies to the @bubbles post of an entry showed up on its page as comments. That feature has been removed, together with the Hot tab, which sorted posts by their newest comment, and the two comment feeds.

Bubbles should focus on what matters most: helping you find good posts on personal blogs. You read them on the blog itself, and your vote helps other people find them. Comments were not needed for that, and they had a downside. They made every post on Bubbles open for discussion, including posts by writers who decided against comments on their own blog. Bubbles never asked them.

Comments were also used far less than votes. In the last month there were about 80 comments and more than 3,300 votes. Keeping them in step with the Fediverse, deleted replies included, was the most complicated part of running the site.

If you want to talk about a post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, share it from your own Fediverse account or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. A kind note from a reader often means more to a writer than a comment on a site they may never visit. Replies written before the change are still on the Fediverse.

I'm a blogger on Bubbles. Can I get a notification when someone votes for my posts?

Yes, if you want to. Add this to your blog's homepage, replacing the handle with your own:

<meta name="bubbles:fediverse" content="@you@your.instance">

From then on, @bubbles mentions you when one of your articles gets its first vote, in the post it writes about it. Boosts and reactions show up in your usual Fediverse notifications. Bubbles checks the tag every few hours; remove it and the mentions stop on the same schedule. Posts that are already out stay unchanged.

Wrong category on a post?

Tap the category label on any list, detail, or briefing page to suggest a better fit. When two different signed-in users propose the same alternative, the category updates automatically. Each post can be auto-corrected once; further suggestions are still recorded but no longer change the label.

Can I hide posts or whole blogs from my view?

Yes, when you're signed in. Tap "hide" in the post's meta line to drop it from your lists, briefings, and personal feeds. On a blog's source page use the "Hide blog" button to drop every post from that author at once. Manage what you've hidden via the links on your votes page: /hiddenposts and /hiddenblogs let you un-hide anything you want back. Public RSS feeds are unaffected.

Reading and tools

What are Top, New, Random, and Following?

Top is the front page, ranked by votes and how recent they are. New shows every post as it comes in, unranked. Random shows posts from random blogs across the whole archive, one per blog, under the filters you have set. Following shows new posts only from blogs you follow (you need to be logged in). Scores are recalculated every fifteen minutes.

What is Briefing?

Briefing is a finite daily edition of the top posts on Bubbles, published once a day at 06:00 Europe/Berlin. Unlike Top and New, a Briefing is static: when you reach the end, you're done, and the next one arrives tomorrow. Archive URLs like /briefing/2026-04-22 are permanent, and you can subscribe via Atom at /briefing/feed.

What are the categories?

Every blog on Bubbles is assigned a category based on its primary focus: Art, Crafts, Culture, Film & TV, Food, Gaming, History, Life, Music, Nature, Politics, Science, Tech, and Writing. You can filter any view by category using the dropdown next to the navigation tabs.

Can I hide posts about a topic?

Yes. Add words to a blacklist in the filter menu. Any post whose title or text contains one of your words is hidden in every view. A word matches whole words only, so ai catches "AI-generated" but not "openai". Add a star for word beginnings: llm* catches llm and llms. The list stays in your browser, the same way the category and vote filters do.

What does "Hide top blogs" do?

Some blogs are on Top almost every day. Tick "Hide top blogs" in the filter menu and their posts are left out of Top, New, Random and the search, which makes room for blogs you see less often.

A blog counts as a top blog when its posts received votes on 10 or more of the last 30 days, spread over at least 3 different posts. The list is recalculated once a day.

What does the NSFW label mean?

Some blogs write mainly about sex and sexuality, some explicitly, some without a single explicit line. Their posts carry a small NSFW label next to the blog name. The label is set by hand for the whole blog, so it also shows on the odd harmless post. A single NSFW post in a blog about something else gets no label.

If you'd rather not see these blogs, tick "Hide NSFW blogs" in the filter menu. Their posts are then left out of Top, New, Random, Following and the search.

Found a blog that should have the label? Write to feedback@bubbles.town.

Does Bubbles use AI?

Not for running the site. Posts, votes, ranking, search, and the category assignments all go through plain code. Categories are decided by a small statistical classifier (Naive Bayes) that ships with the binary and runs on the Bubbles server, with no external service involved.

For writing the code itself, I use Claude Code as a coding assistant during development. That is a tool used to produce the source, not a system the running site depends on. The deployed Bubbles never makes calls to any AI service at runtime.

How do I follow a blog?

Visit any blog's page (click the blog name next to a post) and hit the Follow button in the top right. New posts from that blog will then appear under Following. You can also discover which blogs you vote on most under Your Favourite Blogs.

What are the Classics?

Classics shows the all-time most voted posts and blogs on Bubbles. A good starting point if you're looking for blogs to follow.

Why did a post disappear from Top?

Everything fades over time. Even a well-voted post will eventually sink as newer content comes in.

Can I subscribe via RSS?

Yes. We have feeds for every view, filtered by vote count, and more. See the RSS page for the full list.

How does the search work?

Both site search and the search feed share the same query syntax. You can combine a few simple operators:

Multiple words are AND-joined. rust gamedev finds posts that contain both words, in any order.
OR (or the pipe character |) lets you match alternatives. manga OR comic OR anime returns posts that contain at least one of the three. Case does not matter, so or works too.
A leading minus excludes a word. pasta -recipe returns posts mentioning pasta but not the word recipe.
Combine groups: manga anime OR comic -nsfw parses as "(manga and anime) or (comic but not nsfw)". AND and NOT apply within each OR group.

A word typed without accents also finds the accented spelling, so cafe finds "café" as well. Type the accent and only that spelling counts: café leaves out posts that write "cafe".

Are there keyboard shortcuts?

Yes. Press ? on any list page to see them. Navigate entries with j/k, vote with v, open articles with o, jump between views with t, n, h, r, m. Press p anywhere to open a random post.

Can I change how Bubbles looks?

Yes. The button in the footer cycles through several themes including dark mode, OLED, sepia, and a few surprises.

I'm reading a blog post. Is it on Bubbles?

You can look up any blog post URL on Bubbles. If the post is listed, you'll see its entry page where you can vote for it. Two ways to do this:

Bookmarklet (desktop): Drag Open on Bubbles to your bookmarks bar. Click it on any blog post.
Share menu (mobile): Install Bubbles as a PWA (look for "Install" or "Add to Home Screen" in your browser). Then use your phone's Share button and pick Bubbles from the list.

Are there any easter eggs?

Click the Bubbles logo for a random post. And if you know the Konami code, try it.

Privacy

What data do you store?

Your Fediverse handle, your votes, and which blogs you follow. That's it.

What don't you store?

Emails, passwords, IP addresses, browser fingerprints, tracking cookies. We use Plausible for cookieless analytics, self-hosted on a server in Germany. Our dashboard is public.

Can I delete my data?

Yes. Email feedback@bubbles.town and we'll remove your votes, follows, and handle from the database.

Do you use cookies?

One session cookie to keep you logged in. It's httpOnly, secure, and expires after 30 days. No tracking cookies, no cookie banners.

FAQ