AT friends #1: @schlage.town of @leaflet.pub

@schlage.town (alongside @cozylittle.house and @awarm.space ) makes @leaflet.pub , the platform you're reading this on.

Note: Conversation transcript jumps in time occasionally (indicated with [...]) and was also lightly edited for readability. Bold is @latenthomer.com (me), italics is @schlage.town

@latenthomer.com: Say you ran into someone that you haven't seen in a while and they ask what you're up to and you mentioned leaflet. What's the...

@schlage.town: Yeah, good question. It probably depends if I have one sentence or 10 minutes.The simple way to describe it is, we'd like to say social publishing platform, but that's a little bit vague. It's a blogging tool that lets you create blogs kind of like Substack or WordPress or Tumblr, depending on what people are most familiar with. But it's a tool for making blogs, and it runs on the same technology as Bluesky, called ATProto, which is kind of a powerful layer of infrastructure that lets you keep your same account [...] so it gives users more control and portability, and it does some interesting things with letting a lot of different apps kind of interoperate and be compatible and [there's a] sort of cooperative spirit that is really exciting and fun.

So your leaflet pitch turns to the ATProto, which I like.

I think, yeah, if its someone that I think that would kinda resonate with than yeah, depending on the audience.

For sure.

That's evolved too, when we first launched leaflet it was more document focused, and now it's kind of more publishing focused, but I think there's a lot of interesting space to play between kind of the Google Docs and Notion side of things, like you're writing, you're sharing a document and the kind of more blogging, open web, making fun websites, having comments sections, playing with kind of like social features and ways for people to not only publish but talk about things together and I think that's why it's kind of exciting to be playing in the space with Bluesky.

A little bit of a tangent. Can I ask, was there like a first social network or social experience on the web that you loved?

Oh let's see.

Doesn't have to literally be the first...

I think the one I miss the most was like twitter when it used to be really good.

Yes. Yes. Yeah absolutely.

Which, we can all...you know exact timespan's probably different for each person, like, I don't know, you know like mid-twenty-tens up till when Elon bought it.

That's a good...I'm gonna need to save that question, that's a good question.

Were you on...were you real active on twitter?

Yeah, I was...for me it was like a slow burn, like, like at first it was something, "Oh god I have to be on this [social network] too" and then slowly real time events [became] like the thing that I probably loved the most [about twitter]. I'm an NBA fan so I would watch the game with twitter and see people react in real time and then got into it more.

Yeah I think it was kind of a slow burn for me, too. But there was a, yeah, a time when there was just it felt like a really dense nucleus of people and niche communities, people like nerding out over certain interests...did you see this thing Threadapolooza ?

No!

It was a little, you know the blog ribbon farm ?

No.

That this blogger Venkatesh Rao, basically yeah a blogger with a very long-running kind of influential blog for a lot of nerds kind of like adjacent to a lot of twitter sub-communities but he had fun playing with twitter as a medium asking questions, doing big threads, he came up I think it was like 2019 he came up with the format of 'Post 100 tweets on a topic you want people to hear about'. I think it started out like, "one like, one tweet about xyz." And kind of evolved to be a challenge to write at least 100 tweets. These really big threads that kind of drew this esoteric knowledge out of people in areas that you might not think it would be possible to write 100 tweets about but it just like, was this cool lens into all these very weird different areas people have thought a lot about, and really fun to read and browse, and I feel like that energy is missing from twitter but also kind of yeah it hasn't, hasn't yet made it to Bluesky yet, it doesn't yet have that kind of critical mass necessarily.

Leaflet and ATProto

@schlage.town: We started building [Leaflet] before we added all the ATProto features. Initially we had just kind of like this quick way to make a document, [users] didn't even need an account at all, it's like the kind of instant google doc you could share in a group chat or something and over time yeah we were also excited about Bluesky and ATProto and we were thinking about ways to add more interesting social features and

@latenthomer.com: How did that decision happen, what was that like? Did it feel daunting to try to, like, oh my gosh we're gonna...

Yeah that's a good question. I don't know that it was daunting necessarily, like it was something we were always interested in. It took some time to figure out the right sequencing of it and I think for us it made sense to start with the most simple possible document creation app. It's created a few challenges with kind of fully tying the disparate pieces together but I think it puts us in an interesting position.

We have some cool things that we played with initially that we're kind of just now finishing brining to the Bluesky ATProto universe. Basically we had to make sure that all the block types in the documents were fully supported in how we save that data to like the lexicons. We also want to have a way to make standalone documents that you can publish to ATProto so you don't necessarily have to have a blog. Basically it would just be like a single Google Doc-equivalent but [with] social features, quote-sharing feature, and other things we're thinking about like fun ways to have global discovery mechanisms and things like that.

The first thing that made me really notice Leaflet was the quote-sharing, just highlighting text and seeing those actions you can take, I thought was very cool. Were there things about ATProto that made developing better on your end?

The things that were really nice on our end were like having the user accounts just as an existing thing...I think figuring out Oauth is still kind of notoriously a little bit tricky on ATProto but is like improving by the week as the developer ecosystem and the tooling around it matures.

[...]

I think the most interesting things [that] are starting to emerge now [is we're] seeing glimpses of interoperability with other apps, just like, kind of proofs of concept for how ATProto empowers collaboration across a larger ecosystem, of this kind of like permission-less development. Like other people, we were looking at those lexicons [NOTE: this was earlier in our conversation but not included because it had a visual component--we walked thru some leaflet lexicons visible on https://pdsls.dev/ ] and, yeah, if you OAuth with enough permissions…you could even write different data kind of across apps…it's still kinda like work-in-progress with how that will work but yeah you could even write different data kind of across apps so we've seen some cool examples, like there's an alternative Bluesky client called Anisota , which is really...have you seen that one...?

Ah, yeah I tried it out! It's the one, the flipping cards one right?

Flipping cards, yeah very different, creative UI, card-based decks and stacks of things and yeah, its all Bluesky posts data for the most part they're doing some things with like their own version of Bluesky posts which are more private to that network which is cool but mostly yeah like experimental UI and they made a way to read leaflet posts from someone's profile like if you go to your profile I think there's like a leaflet button you can see the leaflet posts that you've written-

-Oh cool. Did that come from your end or their end?

From their end, yeah.

Oh cool!

Yeah the developer dame I think was just interested in playing with other lexicons and it was a natural kind of first one to start with.

There was another one an app called Popfeed , its like a reviews app its kind of like Goodreads and Letterboxd, multi-media reviews and they I think it's still kind of alpha/beta feature but they made a way to cross post to leaflet. [...]

It's cool to think as a developer now I could be like, I could [use as my] primitives potentially things that other people have build.

Yeah yeah and its cool for us because yeah its like we can kind of have a wider community of people explore things that we either didn't think of or wouldn't have time to do ourselves. Just a couple days ago someone made a leaflet search interface ...

I saw that!

Yeah, which is another great example, like why didn't we have full text search? I dunno, its like, we didn't have time to do it? Or-

But that's like a history of twitter, thing. Like the users came up with things [like retweets, which were later adopted by the platform], yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and that's a fun interaction that anyone can play with.

Lightning Round

Historical Figure you wish had Bluesky?

Emily Dickinson.

Ooh yeah. Nice. What do you personally, Brendan, call a post on Bluesky and a single atomic...thing on leaflet?

I'm a big fan of post.

For which one?

For both!

Okay! Love it. Agree or disagree, this is a yes or no...

We call it a doc, too. On leaflet, but-

Oh what's that?

A doc, doc is another one. But post I like-

Have you seen...and sorry this is lightning round I'm not supposed to ask follow ups but have you seen people, I've seen people just naturally [refer to leaflet posts as 'leaflets,' as in:] "I made a leaflet" . Have you seen that?

Yeah, yeah.

How do you feel about it?

I think it's, yeah, its kind of interesting. Like I mean yeah leaflet already has, its an existing word so its not...we're not like inventing jargon whole-cloth.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah so-

But you call them posts.

Right now, I call them posts. I think, yeah cause leaflet, yeah mostly as it exists most of the things people are publishing kind of fit the mold of a blog post. But I think expanding what a leaflet can be is an interesting thing for us that I would love to see more of. Like a leaflet that is just like a directory, or an index, or a wiki, or enormous list or something.

Thank you for reading! I enjoyed making this and will make more if there's interest. @ or DM me on bluesky for guest suggestions