Bubbles turned one month old today. I launched it on March 21 with a short Mastodon post (original in German):

... So I built Bubbles. For me. And hopefully for a few thousand others too.

On that evening just 4 weeks ago, writing "hopefully for a few thousand others too" was a joke. I put it there because I genuinely assumed this would be a personal tool that maybe a dozen people liked and used. 6,500 visitors in the first month was not on my bingo card.

The numbers

• 6,570 unique visitors
• 44,392 pageviews
• Visitors from 94 countries
• 5,222 blogs, 23,224 posts indexed
• 1,826 votes from 167 different readers
• 263 users have signed-in at least once
• 43 users already use the follow function to follow 153 blogs

Top visitor countries: United States (2,214), Germany (1,261), United Kingdom (578), Singapore (364), Canada (293). Busiest day was yesterday with 1,230 visitors and 4,712 pageviews. Firefox accounts for 32% of visits, which I take as a healthy indie-web signal. Mobile and desktop are split almost evenly.

One more data point: the most active 10% of voters cast 69% of all votes so far. A small, active group is doing most of the ranking work, which is how this kind of system tends to go. The votes from the rest of the readership still shape the long tail. You can bring this number down if you start voting today ;)

What actually surprised me

The part I was not prepared for is how warmly Bubbles has been received. The analytics are nice, but the real sign it's working is what arrives outside the graphs: thoughtful emails from readers, kind DMs on the Fediverse, bloggers writing their own posts about Bubbles, and a handful of donations via Buy Me a Coffee.

And then there's the embed widget. More bloggers than I would have ever expected (I expected exactly one: me, for this blog.) have voluntarily added the vote-count snippet to the bottom of their own posts. Every time I spot another blog with a 🫧 counter below the text, I grin. People putting a small badge for someone else's project on their own site is such a generous thing.

Bloggers who wrote about Bubbles

A non-exhaustive tour, with credit where it's due:

• moddedbear wrote "Bubbles Is the Cool New Way to Find Blogs" and added the vote widget to every post on the site
• William Parker wrote "Good Stuff Bubbles Up 🫧" after spotting Bubbles in his referrals, and designed the emoji vote-widget version that became the basis of the official embed
• Firesphere published "🫧 It is impossible to say 'Bubbles' angrily" (a title I love), with a walkthrough for adding the vote widget
• Kiko wrote "I Love Bubbles", and reached out because he is planning to develop a broader integration
• Matto wrote "Explore the smol web with Bubbles", focusing on the non-tech angle
• sigkill wrote a thoughtful piece, cautious about algorithmic drift, which I enjoyed reading
• dmpop was pleasantly surprised to find his blog in the catalog, and added Bubbles support to his own Tinble blog engine
• Rhys Wynne spotted Bubbles in his analytics and wrote a warm little post about it
• Gordon McLean mentioned Bubbles in his broader post "Why I still like the internet"
• Brandon was unsure at first, we had a pleasant exchange, and he ended up rooting for it

There are more out there, and the full list lives on Bubbles itself.

Thank you

If you voted on a post, followed a blog, added the embed widget to your own site, submitted a blog to suggest@bubbles.town, sent an email, or just read something good and closed the tab satisfied: thank you. Bubbles is a small, weird, personal project. The fact that so many strangers keep showing up is the best kind of feedback I could ask for.

Ben 🫧

sitting at his laptop on his dining table