OpenPLUTO

Good Stuff Bubbles Up 🫧

untitled

I was on my analytics page the other day, one of my quiet routines. Not for numbers, not really. More for the referrals. It's one of the last honest ways to discover corners of the internet that aren't trying to sell you something.

Plus, it's intriguing to see where and who all sees our small smoke signals we all send out into the ether. That's when I saw a domain I didn't recognize:

🫧 Bubbles.town

I clicked through. What I found felt precious, ambitious and new to the world. Alive in that fragile, just-launched way. At the time, the header mentioned it had only been live for 16 days. A brand-new project, still warm.

The idea is simple:

"Good stuff bubbles up.🫧"

And that's exactly what it aims to do.

What Bubbles does

Bubbles is a community-ranked front page for independent blogs.

Instead:

Every post starts equal.

Votes push it up. Time drags it under.

What floats today disappears tomorrow.

It's ephemeral by design.

Why It Exists

I reached out to the creator, Ben from Mülheim, Germany, and asked what sparked this whole thing.

His answer was straightforward:

He wanted a human-curated front page for blogs without needing to subscribe to thousands of RSS feeds.

That's the itch.

Anyone who's ever tried to "do RSS right" knows the trap: You either miss everything or you drown in it.

Bubbles sidesteps that completely.

There's a subtle but important choice here:

Bubbles doesn't reinvent accounts, comments, or identity.

It plugs into the Fediverse.

That means:

It borrows the lightweight feel of Hacker News (votes, comments, ranking) but strips out the usual baggage.

No karma chasing. No "submit your link." No gaming the system.

Just writing… surfacing.

Where the Content Comes From

The feed is built from curated sources like:

There's intention behind what gets pulled in, even before the crowd touches it.

How We Can Help Ben and Bubbles

(and strengthen the Fediverse as a result)

This kind of thing lives or dies on participation.

Ben knows it. If you have ever built something for the web, deep down you know it, too.

Without enough people voting, nothing really "bubbles." It just… sits there. Stagnant.

But that's also what makes it interesting.

This isn't an algorithm waiting to be tuned. It's a place waiting to be used.

A front page that only exists if people care enough to surface what matters.

The Small Web is Growing Up

There's been a quiet shift happening for a while now. Things are shifting, people are making moves. One by one and slowly but surely people are:

But discovery hasn't caught up.

We've rebuilt the blogs. We haven't rebuilt the "front page" of the Small Web.

Bubbles feels like an attempt at exactly that.

Not bigger or louder. Exactly as it needs to be.

Every blog is its own little bubble.

Most of them drift unseen.

Once in a while, something rises.

If enough people notice, it floats for a moment, then it's gone again.

That's not a flaw.

That's the point.

🫧 https://bubbles.town

Please take a few moments to check this out. This kind of stuff gets me so fired up because this is the kind of spirit that was commonplace on the web back in the day.

With hindsight it's easy to see how that innovation was taken for granted by all of us. The major silos came in and murdered competition.

I am delighted to see that when these silos got big enough, they started to be deemed evil enough that people have finally decided to leave. ■

Addendum: After reading seeing this post on Bubbles (Five Lesser-Known Bubbles Features - Bubbles Blog) I've come to realize that clicking the Bubbles logo acts as the platforms RANDOM feature, which is the prime way to get served up something you haven't seen before. It's also worth pointing out this bit from the FAQ as well:

"There's also a Konami code easter egg, but I'll let you discover that one yourself."

Spread the Bubbly Word!

Bubbles