Bubbles, and the old web
I spotted Bubbles in my basic referrers this morning, and my heart lit up. A little directory, surfacing blog posts from actual bloggers, what in the old web is going on?!
This isn’t the first time I’ve spotted a resurgence in indie / ‘old’ web stuff lately. Personal sites are making a comeback, bloggers are taking to their keyboards again, web rings and cliques and other 90s nostalgia links are doing the rounds on reddit and bluesky. But why did this stuff fade out in the first place?
I think Bubbles sums up what went wrong quite aptly on 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.
Hard to find the motivation to create, write, and share if you’re endlessly screaming into a gigantic void with nobody to answer back.
I welcome this new phase of the internet. I’ve missed browsing my blogroll, dropping comments on random blog posts written by people I’ve never met writing about subjects I might never have read about otherwise. That version of the internet made me, and I don’t think I’d be who I am doing what I do without it today.
gurupanguji said:
On 13 Aug 2026 at 11:33 am
Found you through bubbles. So, just letting you know, you’re not shouting into the void!
Jem said:
On 14 Aug 2026 at 9:38 am
Thanks gurupanguji! Nice to ‘meet’ you, thanks for dropping a comment :)
Sebastian said:
On 13 Aug 2026 at 10:28 pm
I found you on Bubbles as well. Love this site. And blogroll.org too.
Jem said:
On 14 Aug 2026 at 9:39 am
Nice to ‘meet’ you Sebastian :) Thanks for visiting!
Thomas said:
On 14 Aug 2026 at 7:13 pm
I found you on Bubbles too — also enduring the heatwave, keep that greenhouse thriving!
Karin said:
On 15 Aug 2026 at 7:42 pm
It’s nice to see the old web resurface, isn’t it? I was about to call it quits many times over the years until I found places like Yesterweb, IndieWeb, and The 32-Bit Café, and realised it was still out there. Just buried under a tonne of ad-infested bullshit making it hard to find..
And it’s not only us old veterans either, younger generations are joining in too. Seeing kids on Neocities creating websites that look straight out of the 90s makes me feel some kind of hope :)
Jem said:
On 21 Aug 2026 at 10:32 am
I think seeing the younger generations taking it up is a big relief – was actually starting to worry that this stuff was a lost art! Tried to get my own kids interested and they’d rather watch short form video than do anything constructive :|
Jasper said:
On 17 Aug 2026 at 8:52 pm
Found you through Bubbles. I am desperate to go back to an internet where actual people wrote words they believed.
Jem said:
On 21 Aug 2026 at 10:31 am
Thanks for popping by! Big fan of writing words I believe in – sometimes gets me into trouble in fact 😬
Jordan said:
On 22 Aug 2026 at 2:07 am
I got back into the indie web scene last year after I found Neocities and Nekoweb. Completely overwhelmed 00s nostalgia and started spam saving fun gifs and pixels. Except this time I have TBs of space vs a dinky floppy disk. I’ve also seen so many people linking to archive.org for the Q*Bee and other people I know you’d remember.
They’re so creative with how they’ve been replicating that era, I love it. There’s something about 9px & 11px verdana that just does it for me. It’s just shocking that I’m no longer 16-20 like they are now ;___;