Bubbles is a website built by Ben, who lives in Mülheim, Germany. It automatically collects or aggregates a list from a whole pile on independent websites. Sites built by ordinary people posting about things that interest them.

Subscribers to Bubbles can then vote on individual posts causing them to ‘bubble up’ to the top of the list.

Rather than explaining, let me just show you. Here is the current list.
You can browse down the list and check out any of the posts that might be of interest. And stuff that might serendipitously become interesting to you in the future.

If you don’t have the time for that you can get a daily or weekly digest of the posts that have received the most votes over that timeframe.

Bubbles daily briefing.
Bubbles weekly briefing.

Once you begin browsing through this stuff it you notice pretty quickly the refreshing experience of independently crafted websites that do not smother you with ads or affiliate links or AI slop.

I have been using bubbles regularly for a while now. I grab the RSS feed of the daily briefing which displays in my Reeder (huh?…this is what I am talking about). Already, I have discovered quite a few people worth following. People who I would otherwise never have ‘met’, certainly not on the big corporate social media feeds.

Wandering around this landscape is a little addictive really. It is sorta like the web used to be back in the 90s except it is actually the nascent conceptions of how the web will be in the future.