Bubbles.town: Four Months Later
After four months of using Bubbles.town, I share my long-term review of the IndieWeb aggregator. The good: discovering diverse blogs across niche topics. The issues: glacial pace of content changes, popularity contest dynamics, categorization problems, and sparse community participation. Overall, Bubbles is a valuable tool among many for web discovery, but not without its problems.
t was near the end of April when [I interviewed the creator of Bubbles.town](https://brennan.day/floating-up-an-interview-with-the-creator-of-bubbles-town-benjamin-behnke/), Benjamin Behnke, and I feel as though I've been using the platform for enough time to give a more long-term review of it now. Here are some of my thoughts, and if you disagree with any please drop a comment!
## The Good
I want to start with the positive, which is that I've discovered and continue to find new blogs on a wide variety of interesting topics thanks to Bubbles. Blogs about [family genealogy](https://climbingmyfamilytree.blogspot.com/), [wonderful illustrators](https://corianderinpho.com/works/), [musicians](https://blog.curiousquail.com), [souping](https://qtea.me/posts/souping-up-my-blog/), [Star Wars action figures](https://figureoftheday.blogspot.com/2026/08/star-wars-figure-of-day-day-3374-r2.html), [Google Maps](https://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/), [science fiction writers](https://www.velcro-city.co.uk/ours-is-the-tragedy-of-the-silent-stars/), [bullet journals](https://noisydeadlines.net/my-bullet-journal-setup-personal-august-2026). I could go on and on, and that's just from this week.
There are so many topics I don't have any knowledge of whatsoever, and it makes me so happy that there are people who have dedicated blogs to these topics! Bubbles allows me to discover personal sites that I would not have encountered otherwise. It reminds me of visiting my public library and browsing the more obscure aisles of the Dewey Decimal system and being astounded that so many books on each particular topic exist.
In this sense, Bubbles has been a fantastic success story for the IndieWeb, and demonstrates how it is a net positive rather than a net negative, in my opinion.
That said, I do still certainly have my issues with the aggregator, particularly as it becomes more popular and used as a primary source for bloggers and IndieWeb participants. So, onto my qualms.
## The Pace
I don't know if I visit the aggregator too often (two or three times a day) but I notice that the top posts change at a rather glacial pace. It reminds me of how, back in 2018, Reddit changed their default sorting from "Hot" to "Best" and the ability to use the site for breaking news near totally collapsed.
And I think this is especially puzzling since it's Blaugust, surely people are blogging like crazy right now, right? I'm not sure if this simply has to do with how Bubbles calculates its algorithm: Score = (1 + Votes × 25) / (EffectiveAge + 2) ^ 1.4. Now, this is indeed an algorithm, but it is not an impossible black box algorithm that is unknowable to even the engineers who designed it, the way corporate social media has. It's just plain math.
## The Popularity Contest
One thing
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