Bubbles: a Hacker News-style vote feed for independent blogs

An aggregator called Bubbles, at bubbles.town, applies the mechanics of Hacker News and Lobste.rs to a different internet: personal, independent blogs rather than company announcements and product launches.

How it works

The site monitors thousands of independent personal blogs through their RSS feeds. Every new post appears on Bubbles automatically — nobody submits individual links. According to the project's about page, the blogs were hand-picked from curated sources and individually reviewed, and readers can check whether a given blog is already listed.

Readers vote, and the front page is shaped by votes and time. The published formula is Score = (1 + Votes × 25) / (EffectiveAge + 2)^1.4, where 25 is a fixed weight per vote and EffectiveAge is the hours since the last vote, never less than half of the post's actual age. Comments are deliberately excluded from the ranking: a back-and-forth between two users can inflate a comment count without reflecting wider interest, while votes are capped at one per person. The gravity constant of 1.4 is lower than Hacker News's 1.8, so posts stay visible for longer.

There are three main views — Top, New and Hot — plus a Briefing, a Classics view, a random-post view and RSS feeds for every view. Clicking a title takes the reader off the site and onto the blog itself; the project says it will never build reading views that keep people away from the author's own page.

Fediverse identity, Fediverse comments

Bubbles has no separate account system. Readers sign in with a Fediverse account — Mastodon, Pixelfed, GoToSocial and others are supported — and their voting history gradually builds a personal list of favourite blogs. Following a blog produces a "My feed" of new posts from those blogs only.

Discussion lives on the Fediverse too. Every post on Bubbles has a corresponding post from the account @[email protected]; replies there appear as comments on the aggregator. The project says it stores only the Fediverse handle, votes and followed blogs: no emails, no passwords, no tracking. Analytics are cookieless and self-hosted in Germany, and the dashboard is public.

Why someone built it

The about page sets out the gap the project aims to fill: Hacker News and Lobste.rs have community voting figured out, but non-technical content is drowned out by a technical majority; Kagi's Small Web curates thousands of personal sites but has no community-driven ranking; blog directories help readers find blogs, not the best post of the day; and Mastodon shows only what the people you follow share.

Bubbles was built by Ben, from Mülheim in Germany, who says he wanted "something like Hacker News for the non-tech internet". The site also lets readers hide posts by keyword and publishes the full list of monitored blogs as plain text and OPML. Its front page in recent days has carried posts such as "Why Personal Websites Are Coming Back" and "More meaningful online interactions, please".