Welcome to Leaflet. If you are confused, you aren't alone

Hi everyone! I'm Paweł, but if you are here you probably already know me in real life. In case you don't, and that you just found this blog post by accident, welcome.

Credits go to Alex for convincing me to start my own blog ("I want to keep hearing your random tech ramblings").

https://bulimov.me/ External Link • bulimov.me

Anyway, getting to the point. You may notice the domain is pzmarzly.leaflet.pub. What's Leaflet? It's a publication platform, similar to Medium (back when it wasn't full of spam) or Substack. But with one big caveat: it's built using AT Protocol (Bluesky's protocol).

What does it mean? I know many people here don't care about Bluesky and its ecosystem, so: In overly simplified terms, if you have a Bluesky account, it consists of records and events. And nothing says their types need to be understandable by Bluesky itself. So aside from the typical app.bsky.feed.post records and whatnot, you can use your account to store your public keys (see Germ), Git forge interactions (see Tangled), or, you guessed it, blog posts!

https://www.germnetwork.com/ External Link • germnetwork.com https://tangled.org/ External Link • tangled.org

There is a much better explanation of the whole Bluesky / ATmosphere design here:

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers External Link • atproto.com

But yeah, the point I was leading towards is: the backend of this blog is my Bluesky account. Leaflet is just a frontend that displays it.

Note: I'm using Bluesky account and AT Proto account interchangeably. In practice it's possible to have an Atmosphere account and never use it with Bluesky.

But how do I follow you then??!

And that's the big question that, at the moment, isn't answered well by Leaflet. Yeah, a bummer. I'd expect the story here to be a bit better.

I mean, if you have your own Bluesky account, it's easy, and so far most authors on Leaflet are writing about ATProto / Bluesky, so most of the audience probably has an account. You click on Follow, and then all new posts appear in:

That's the well-optimized route.

But most of you (i.e. my target audience) do not have a Bluesky account, probably do not want one, and wouldn't be using it if I forced you to set one up. Which options does it leave us?

So I guess I will just put the RSS reminder in the footer of every post. Unless someone can propose a better solution?

Leaflet first impressions

Aside from that "small" issue, I find the platform pretty great. The WYSIWYG editor is really neat, autosave works, Markdown input is supported. The platform has many interactive elements to insert, like:

Check-in form

Or:

It also has nice support for code blocks and inline code.

<h1 class="big" onclick="test(1);">Test</h1>

And LaTeX?

And green yellow red highlighting.

So overall, I recommend it for all authors. But the email situation is a major flaw.