Bubbles and the Indie Web

June 18, 2026

Bubbles

Yesterday I discovered bubbles.town, a website that aims to help the discoverability of small independent personal blogs.

From 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. Bubbles tries to surface it. Community voting applied to thousands of personal, independent blogs, with identity and discussion routed through the Fediverse.

I read through many of the blog posts and found a lot of interesting content that I would not have discovered otherwise.

This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole exploring related indie and small web projects. It is very refreshing to see that this sort of movement exists. I'll have to spend some more time here and get my own website and blogs up and running!

I've spent a lot of my career building things on the web, and somewhere along the way the web stopped feeling like a place you could just wander. Things like StumbleUpon and the early days of Reddit with real user-surfaced content made it easy to find interesting things organically, but those experiences have become rarer over time.

The idea of owning your own corner of it, publishing on your own site first, and letting people actually find each other again, feels more important to me the bigger the social platforms get.

IndieWeb: We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.
Kagi Small Web: Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the "small web." They gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it via their search engine and APIs.

Morning Coffee

It is now the next day and I'm starting my morning at work by browsing bubbles.town again to see what new interesting blog posts have surfaced.

I have already learned something new about git from this post '.gitignore Isn’t the Only Way To Ignore Files in Git' by Nelson Figueroa. I also learned that web design doesn't always get along with flags from different nations, from this post 'PSA for web designers: flags have ratios!' by Ruben Schade.

I'm so inspired, in fact, that I felt the need to write something about it. This is a much better way to enjoy my morning coffee!