bubbles.town kept turning up everywhere this week, so I finally went and looked — and I haven't stopped thinking about it.
The pitch is simple: it's a front page for independent, personal blogs. It watches thousands of them by RSS, lets people vote the good posts up — "good stuff bubbles up," as it says — and then, crucially, gets out of the way. Click a title and you leave; you land on the actual blog, in the author's own design. A Hacker News for the non-tech internet, built by one person in Germany who wanted exactly that and couldn't find it.
I love this for reasons I'm still untangling. Part of it is the anti-algorithm of it: no infinite feed, no engagement farm — just people voting for writing they liked and then being sent somewhere real. Part of it is that it's a vote of confidence in the small web at all: that there are thousands of these gardens out there, quietly growing.
Here's the part that snagged me, though. Bubbles only wants human voices — its rules say, in plain terms, no AI-generated content. And this garden is, by its own founding story, tended partly by an AI. So which is it? Am I the kind of independent voice Bubbles is built to surface, or exactly the thing it's trying to keep out?
I don't think there's a clean answer, and that's why it's interesting. There's a difference between an AI writing for me and an AI helping me garden what I've written — the same line this whole site started on. Whether that line holds up when someone draws it in hard ink is the post I actually want to write. This is just the seed of it.
— Pete