Leaflet, Blogging, and How to Fix Social Media

This is going to be one of those instances where I probably fail to take my own advice. You’re reading this on my Leaflet powered blog, and I’m about to tell you not just about why Leaflet is so cool, but also why I think Leaflet, or something like it, is a better way to approach a big chunk of your social media time than what most of us now think about as social media. (And, as a bonus, why Leaflet, or something like it, is better than email newsletters, too.)

Then I’ll hit publish and very likely go back to posting obsessively on Bluesky. Social media’s addictive, though that addiction has less to do with the usual suspects people name—and think doing away with will reform the medium’s problems. Namely, while engagement metrics play a role (who doesn’t enjoy likes? who doesn’t like reposts?), you could get rid of them and it wouldn’t change the underlying appeal. The reason social media is addictive is the same reason we enjoy parties: It’s rapid-fire socialization with tons of people. I say something, it doesn’t need to be fully composed paragraphs of examined thoughts, and you quickly respond. But not just you. Anyone can. It’s a party of infinite scale. That’s pretty cool.

But there’s a reason we have methods of socializing in real life that aren’t parties, and why most of us are drawn to them, even if we also enjoy parties. In a Leaflet post about disengaging from social media, Mason Stallmo wrote that, “The entire idea of encouraging people to consume what are functionally streams of conscious from other people directly is toxic for just about everything good in life.” And that’s exactly right. With a qualifier. What makes social media troubling isn’t that we should never be in a situation where we’re consuming the streams of consciousness of others, because that’s what parties are and parties are fun and rewarding. What makes social media trouble is that ours is a world where digital communication has become the dominant way many of us socially interact, and if our primary digital communication is through social media, then it’s like if we only ever interacted in the real world via parties. That would kind of suck.

The solution, then, isn’t to abandon short-form, stream-of-consciousness social media entirely, just like the solution, when you move beyond the all-parties-all-the-time of your early 20s, isn’t to never go to a party again. Rather, it’s to layer in alternatives that provide ways of socializing that are calmer, quieter, more considered, more composed. We need spaces that aren’t short-form text or short-form video, but force us to take a moment before we speak, or to commit to something long enough that we need to think about it for a moment and decide if it’s worth saying in such a relatively more lofty form. But we also need spaces where that length doesn’t turn to paralysis. If I have to write an essay before I can say anything at all, then unless I have something rather big to say, I won’t say anything at all.

What’s critical, though, as we’re looking to spend more of our time in these calmer, quieter, and slower cadence spaces, is to ensure that those spaces feel satisfying. They shouldn’t, or at least won’t, take all of our time away from Bluesky and similar social media, but they should give us that sense of connection, of socialization. And if they can hook into the “socializing at scale” model, so much the better. The benefit of communicating in a digital space is, unlike a party where your voice can at best carry to the other side of the room and where having it do even that probably comes off as rude, your voice can reach everyone. What we want, then, is alternatives to Bluesky, etc., that get us the slow-down-and-think-about-what-you’re-writing effects, but aren’t siloed. Instead, we want the spaces we’re in, and the kinds of things we’re writing (or saying) in each, to overlap and interact.

This is why I think the answer to healthier social media is to add (back) blogs. But it’s not adding (back) blogs as they worked before. Instead, it’s about taking advantage of emerging decentralized technologies, particularly technologies like Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol, to achieve something even better. And I see Leaflet as an early stage—though rapidly progressing—move in that direction.

The Trouble with Newsletters

Let’s talk about blogs. Blogger is gone, at least as a relevant social force. But there’s Substack. Or, rather, there are email newsletters, which dominate independent publishing for anything longer than a few hundred characters. Yes, we don’t use Google Reader to aggregate blogs anymore, but we do use Gmail to gather our email newsletters. Isn’t this basically the same thing? Bluesky’s for the short stuff, Newsletters are for the longer stuff. (And I hope, and especially if you’re the sort of person who left Twitter over its owners bending of the platform to promote hateful views, something other than Substack.)

Yes. But also no. It’s true that newsletters have taken over the space that blogs once occupied. And a lot of the most successful newsletter writers were also successful bloggers. But newsletters aren’t blogs. They’re something worse.

To understand why, let’s take one of the few remaining old-school blogs that’s managed to maintain its popularity: John Gruber’s Daring Fireball . Gruber's posts range from very quick “Here’s an article I liked, with a chunk pulled into a block quote, and a link” (analogous to sharing an article on Bluesky by including a link and a screenshot of a paragraph or two) to very long “Here’s where I think Apple’s going wrong with their business” essays (analogous to your typical newsletter post). But it’s all jumbled together, and the publishing frequency is inconsistent, with multiple posts some days and then long periods of silence. That’s fine. That’s how blogging works.

Daring Fireball, by John Gruber

Commentary on Apple, technology, design, politics, and more.

But it’s not how newsletters work. Newsletters are great for multi-thousand-word essays, like the one you’re reading now. But the distribution mechanism means they’re not great for the “Here’s an article I liked, a passage from it, and my brief commentary.” Part of this is ancestry. Newsletters, historically, have been longer and infrequent. They were one or two or more pages of paper you got in the mail. They were sent out monthly, or quarterly, or some frequency a good deal lower than multiple times a day. When they moved to email, and when our contemporary newsletter platforms brought them mainstream, they became the home for anyone who wanted to publish longer stuff online, but that “long and infrequent” culture stuck. When you send your newsletter to your mailing list, it’s going into their email inbox, alongside order confirmations, notes from friends, maybe all their work email, updates from their kids’ teachers, and so on. It’s a lot. Which means that if you send multiple emails a day to your list, your subscribers are going to get fussy. Even daily feels like a demand on their time. Especially because you’re pushing your posts into a space that, given everything else email is for, they really can’t set aside for the day or the week and then get to only when the mood strikes.

Thus, while it’s true that newsletter platforms structurally look like only blogging platforms (you get a homepage with a list of your posts, and comments beneath), the way emails are distributed influences the form the writing takes.

Blogging, on the other hand, is much more flexible. Look again at Daring Fireball. You can even treat blog posts the way you do Bluesky posts, dashing them off as very short thoughts. But there’s something about the cultural sense of what blogging is, and the way blog posts appear on something that feels like your website, instead of feeling like a line in a global feed, that encourages a slower and more in-depth approach.

So what I think is ideal, what I’d like to see us settle into, is social media plus blogging. Bluesky plus Leaflet.

Leaflet + Bluesky > Twitter + Blogger

But this isn’t the same as going back to Twitter plus Blogger. For one, both Bluesky and Leaflet are built on the AT Protocol, an open network that you own and control your presence in. To give a very rough sketch of what that means, when you sign up for a Bluesky account, what you’re actually doing is creating a store of data on what’s called a Personal Data Server (PDS). This is basically a bundle of all the content you create (e.g., Bluesky posts), stored on a computer somewhere. When you create a new post on Bluesky, the context of it is written into your PDS.

What makes this exciting is two features of a PDS that set it apart from your tweets living on Twitter’s servers or your blogs living on Blogger’s. First, you control the PDS. In a real sense, it belongs to you. Access to it, such as the permission to write to it, is controlled by the keys you created when you made that first account. Chances are, your existing PDS lives, right now, on Bluesky’s servers, because they’re by far the biggest PDS host out there. But it doesn’t need to. Your ownership means you can move it whenever you’d like. That could be to another service or it could be to your own self-hosted server. And if you don’t like where you end up, you can move it again. Second, your PDS is platform agnostic. Yes, it can store Bluesky posts. But if you sign up for Leaflet, it’ll also store your Leaflet blogs. In fact, anyone can create a service that writes to your PDS, and so long as you give that service access, it can create entries in your personal database. Further, those services can write any kind of content imaginable. The technical term for this is a lexicon. A Bluesky post has a lexicon defining what goes into it. Date, post content, etc. A Leaflet post has its own lexicon that includes titles, polls, much longer text, etc. A TikTok alternative built on this PDS technology would define yet another lexicon that includes all the stuff needed for short-form videos.

The content stored in your PDS is public. Anyone can browse it. (Though the AT Protocol developers are working on new ways to make some of it private, or to make some of it only accessible by people of your choosing.) Putting these two features together, AT Protocol’s PDS technology means that you own your presence, and that presence ties your various conversation places together. And because the data, or most of it, is public, others can pull these threads together, too. We can build views into conversational structures and connections that cut across platforms (and content forms), but those content forms aren’t tied to a particular platform. I post public short-form text via Bluesky, but the posts themselves live in my PDS, and so can appear outside of Bluesky, or I can continue posting them even if I stop using Bluesky entirely. My blog posts are made via Leaflet, and if you visit www.aaronrosspowell.com , what you’ll see is hosted on Leaflet’s servers. But all my articles are stored in my PDS, and so can be remixed and repackaged and distributed in ways outside of Leaflet’s control. The platforms aren’t the home for my expression, they’ve views into it.

Imagine Tumblr, but half the people you’re interacting with have never used Tumblr, but are instead on Bluesky. Or the option to follow a bunch of people you find interesting, and have a custom interface where you can see, share, and interact with everything they say, no matter if it’s a post, a blog, an essay, a video, or a podcast. And where using that isn’t a matter of tracking people down everywhere they might be, but instead knowing just their atmosphere (that’s what folks have taken to calling the AT Protocol ecosystem) presence (I’m @aaronrosspowell.com) and that single point of entry giving you a menu of everything.

This also lets you customize how you get whatever selection of what that person writes, produces, says, etc., you want. It could come through a custom feed on Bluesky. Or email. Or Feedly or Reeder. It could be real time, or bundled, and bundled daily or weekly or when fancy machine learning determines that something that person has added to their PDS, no matter what form it takes or where it was added from, would be of particular interest to you. And because all of these options are building on open data, creative and talented developers can build new ways to interact with all the information from all the people you follow, and you can try those out with effectively zero friction, or use multiple simultaneously.

What’s critical, too, is that the person creating the content you want to follow doesn’t have to think about any of this. They don’t need to know anything about the PDS their Bluesky posts or Leaflet blogs are going into. They never need to use any particular platform within the atmosphere. They could only ever use one.

This becomes key to solving the biggest problem with heading over to Blogger right now (it still exists) and starting a blog: discoverability and distribution. If you want people to follow your new blog, you’ll have to convince them to follow you on Bluesky, and then you share your new posts there. Or they’ll have to find your blog in a search engine, and then make a point of visiting regularly. Or they’ll need to set up a new tool they might not already be using (an RSS reader, for example) to aggregate the blogs they read, but then remember to read their aggregator, in addition to their email inbox and their social media feed. And if they want to interact with what you’ve written, they need to do that in a different space from where they’re interacting with everyone else, and that means everyone else isn’t seeing the conversations they’re participating in with you.

The way newsletter platforms have tried to solve this is recommendation networks, which result in subscriptions, which result in emails sent to inboxes, or, in the case of Substack, a push for readers to use the Substack app, yet another social media platform.

But Leaflet, because it’s built on the AT Protocol, can integrate with Bluesky. If you log into Leaflet with your atmosphere account (most likely your Bluesky account), you can get a custom feed in Bluesky of new Leaflet posts from everyone you follow on Bluesky. Instantly. And if another of your follows starts posting on Leaflet three weeks from now, her posts will just show up. You can imagine a world where comment threads are accessible on both your Leaflet posts and on Bluesky, or where mentions of posts on Leaflet turn into posts referencing those on Bluesky, and so appear in Bluesky notifications.

And (and I know I’m saying “and” a lot, but all this stuff builds on itself), because your Leaflet posts don’t belong to Leaflet, but are in your PDS, if you decide you’d rather your blog be run by some other engine, so long as that engine can read the Leaflet post lexicon (this is why it’s good if lexicons get treated as standards), none of your connections or conversations break.

What Leaflet Needs

I could go on. This is the most exciting personal publishing on the internet has been in a long time, and we’re just at the beginning. And I’m using Leaflet as my example not because it will necessarily end up as the default way people write blog posts in the Atmosphere, but because it doesn’t have to. The Leaflet team is doing awesome things, and has even more awesome plans, and the service is already robust enough for you to start using today, but if Leaflet is just one among many equally popular AT Protocol blogging engines, that’s just as good. Because they’re all just views into your writing.

Leaflet is under quite active development, and the official Leaflet Leaflet is the place to go to see what’s new. But I want to close with some of my thoughts on what I think it needs to fully become what I hope it can become. Some of these are features Leaflet’s team has already said are coming, and some are coming quite soon. I’m just going to write them all down, anyway, because I think together they paint a good picture of what would be my perfect writing place.

Leaflet Lab Notes

Behind the scenes as we build a social publishing platform on Bluesky / AT Protocol — blogs, newsletters, and beyond!

Mentions. Currently, I can link to other Leaflet posts, just as I can link to any other website, but there’s no elegant way for me to mention a post or an author such that they get notified of the mention, or that the mention (optionally) shows up on their posts, the way the old trackbacks and pingbacks did. There are challenges in this (e.g., spam), but having mentions would supercharge the social aspect of Leaflet blogging. Update: Leaflet launched mentions in early December.

Atmospheric @-mentions! - Leaflet Lab Notes

Lab Notes 017: mention Bluesky accounts, Leaflet publications, specific posts and more to come — an interface for links across the atmosphere

Longer shared quotes. One of Leaflet’s coolest features is the way it handles sharing quotes from articles. To see it in action, highlight some text here, and then click the little “Share to Bluesky” that pops up. The resulting link preview in Bluesky will use the quote as its thumbnail image. This is exceptionally clever. The trouble is, it means you can’t share much more than a few lines of text before it just runs off the bottom of the image. But sharing big quotes from an article you like is one of the best ways to discuss it on social media. My spitballed solution is, if the quote is longer than would fit in the preview image, have Leaflet instead share an actual image, attached to the post, and then include the link in the post text.

Notifications. This is partly just restating “mentions,” but at the moment, Leaflet doesn’t tell you if someone shares your post, quotes it, or leaves a comment. It should. Update: Leaflet launched notifications in November.

Notifications in Leaflet - Leaflet Lab Notes

Lab Notes 015: we now have in-app notifications for post comments, replies, and new publication subscribers

Email. And, specifically, bundled email. Right now, there are two ways you can follow my Leaflet blog. You can click the “Follow” button at the bottom of this post, and you’ll get a custom feed in Bluesky of Leaflet blogs you follow. Or you can subscribe to my RSS feed in your preferred RSS reading app. Both are great. But in a world dominated by newsletters, people ought to be able to subscribe via email. This the Leaflet team has said is coming. However, to get around the “long and infrequent” probably I noted with newsletters, I’d like to see the option of setting your own delivery frequency when you subscribe. Specifically, I’d like an option to say “Send me everything as it’s published,” “Send me one email a day that bundles everything published that day,” or “Send me one email a week that bundles everything published that week.” This should be the subscriber’s choice, not a frequency set by the writer. Update: Leaflet launched email newsletters in May, but hasn't (yet) launched digests.

Navigation. I’d like to be able to create a navigation bar on my Leaflet webpage. Let me have links to whatever I want. Maybe that’s a post on Leaflet (an “About” page, for example), or maybe it’s an external link, such as an item that says “Podcast” and points to my podcast. This will help Leaflet blogs become more like home pages.

Tags. Let me add subject matter tags to my posts. This will help me organize them, and help readers find more stuff I’ve written related to particular topics. But they’ll also help with discovery. Let me create a custom feed on Bluesky that shows me all Leaflet posts about a topic or combination of topics. Update: On December 12, Leaflet launched experimental tagging.

Experimenting with tags in Leaflet - Leaflet Lab Notes

Lab Notes 018: a simple implementation of global tags for Leaflet posts, to help writers and communities coordinate and find each other — with some early examples and ways to try!

Recommendations. Find Leaflet posts I might be interested in that aren’t from people I follow. Maybe I can like Leaflet posts and it uses that to find similar content. Or it finds Leaflet publications followed by people I follow.

Stats. These could be baked into the platform (a stats dashboard) or as simple as letting me add a line of JavaScript to include stats tracking from elsewhere. The point isn’t vanity metrics. It’s that knowing where your readers are coming from is a way to spot nodes in the conversation you'd otherwise have missed. Update: Leaflet now has full traffic analytics for Pro subscribers.

Monetization. Not all hobbies need to be monetized. Old-school blogs rarely were. But we’re in an era of memberships and supporters, and there are clever ways to take advantage of the open nature of AT Protocol and its upcoming private data features to enable paid subscriptions, paywalled posts, and early access posts. This would make Leaflet even more appealing to people currently on other newsletter platforms.

Design. You can already tweak what your Leaflet blog looks like, to some extent. You can mess with colors and set a background, but you can’t change the typeface, nor can you organize your homepage, add a custom header or footer, or other ways it’d be nice to have to express ourselves. Update: You can now set custom fonts.

That’s my wishlist for now. I’m sure I’ll add more, and I’ll flag the ones that get added after I’ve published this. For now, though, I just want to reiterate how excited I am by what Leaflet represents, and encourage you, if you want a place to write online, to check it out.