Ecosystem Plugins

Lego - the ultimate plugin system (source)

I've recently been getting back into using Obsidian after a years long hiatus mostly using Logseq and -- gulp -- Apple Notes.

While Obsidian comes with some great features and "core plugins" out-of-the-box, a big part of my re-onboarding experience has been customizing the environment with community plugins to fit my specific needs: exporting flashcards to anki with custom templates, converting kindle highlights to obsidian notes, setting up kanban boards, directory navigation enhancements, etc.

This process is trial-and-error: I search for existing plugins and test them out to see how they work. If I like them, I'll continue to practice using them (tools are best paired with habits). If not, I remove it and look for another. If I really can't find exactly what I'm looking for it's not a deal-breaker for Obsidian. I could always try building my own obsidian plugin or, since all the data in stored locally and formatted as (obsidian-flavoured) markdown, I could build/use any kind of program that can access local, easy-to-read/manipulate files.

The key point is that much of the functionality that makes Obsidian so valuable doesn't come from the core Obsidian team.

I expect that if the atproto ecosystem continues to mature, we'll find ourselves in an analogous situation as the Obsidian ecosystem does -- except the community plugins won't be for a single app, but the ecosystem at large.

We're already catching glimpses of this future.

Emerging tools like @airglow.run allow anyone to create atproto automations -- protocol plugins, really. For example, automatically converting stars of Tangled repos to Semble cards (by @vicwalker.dev.br) or taking any liked bsky post and creating Semble cards for any links in the post (by @accio.blue).

These kinds of conversions enable customized forms of interoperability without apps needing to share lexicons or coordinate on standards, which can be a time consuming and difficult process (especially if the domain is not yet well established -- @standard.site being a great example of when lexicon standardization makes sense).

On top of tools like airglow, there are emerging tools around interactive embeddings and components like webtil.es and @inlay.at. Both of which can empower community members to not only build protocol plugins at the data-layer, but at the interface-layer -- whether completely separate apps or embedded widgets in existing apps.

It's not hard to imagine a future where new users of the open social web can be greeted with countless plugins to customize their own information environments, just like with Obsidian. Except they aren't limited to a single app but instead an entire protocol-based ecosystem.

This is a post-app paradigm.