What is Standard Site, and why is it useful?

Standard Site, launched at the beginning of this year, is a set of shared standards for publishing longform content on the internet, focused on interoperable content discovery and social features.

As the @standard.site ecosystem grows — from Bluesky's link card integration to WordPress's new plugin to community reader tools emerging — more people are hearing about it and wondering:

What exactly is Standard Site, and what is it good for?

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TL;DR what is Standard Site?

The easiest way to think about Standard Site is probably:

What if we had a way to write and follow publications on the internet, built on a large-scale social network graph?

It's a standard format for publishing and engaging with longform content on the internet (think: blogs!) in a way that's linked to your identity and easy to aggregate, built on AT Protocol.

Here's what happens when you publish something using Standard Site — a blog post in a Leaflet publication, for example:

Writers: posts you publish live in a place you control. Readers: your subscriptions and recommends do too.

Per @jimray.bsky.team in Let’s build an Atmospheric Web, it's about enabling both ownership and distribution in the social web.

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How is this different from RSS?

The basic problem RSS solves: given a blog (or podcast / website), what are its latest posts?

Standard Site is also about aggregating longform content on the internet. The two biggest differences are that with Standard Site, data is fundamentally associated with identity, and it's easy to index across the entire network.

With social primitives in Standard Site that don't exist in RSS, like recommends and subscribes, together with user identity, we can build up a really useful graph of social relationships around content. This makes it easy to, for example, see all the publications your friends subscribe to, or what posts they've most shared.

With the atproto firehose, we get a global distribution layer, compared to RSS where crawling and collection is more ad-hoc.

Jim also describes how atproto and RSS complement one another, and how new feed readers might enable richer social experiences, at What you can do with AT Protocol.

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What Standard Site makes possible

Standard Site enables more flexible, composable experiences for readers and writers alike; lots of cool things are possible already:

Different apps can compete on different parts of the experience, and things like this become possible in Bluesky — or in any app:

As Standard Site becomes more ubiquitous, we get something like RSS but with full social context, including two-way relationships between readers and publishers, as well as exciting potential for things like communities within the broader social graph.

Readers get stronger signals for discovery and more ways to enter conversations. Publishers get stronger connections to their audience and more flexibility with things like memberships. For example, we could build ways to let your Bluesky followers get exclusive access to certain content, or members-only commenting permissions.

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How do I use Standard Site?

You can publish with @leaflet.pub — or other tools like @pckt.blog and @offprint.app — to publish to Standard Site out of the box.

If you have a self-hosted static site you can use @sequoia.pub to easily publish Standard Site records, or roll your own integration.

On WordPress? Use the ATmosphere plugin or Autoblue.

There are a few layers to how you can use Standard Site — you can use all of these, or just some:

To explore the ecosystem, check out:

Standard Site is a great example of what AT Protocol makes possible as a technology, and what the Atmosphere makes possible as an ecosystem — a collaboratively created and stewarded set of standards leading to the emergence of lots of useful things.

It's not just a theoretical spec but a pragmatic thing that's easy to integrate, and already being widely implemented.

Play around, explore the docs, and reach out if you have questions!