Everybody has a Leaflet, so do I!

Leaflet has really taken off in the recent months – it feels like everyone I hang out with in the ATProto community on Bluesky has one these days! There are so many people blogging now, that I started using an RSS reader (NetNewsWire) again after a very long break just to make sure I'm keeping up with everything.

My "ATProto" folder there looks like this, and as you can see by the favicons, the vast majority of those are on Leaflet:

I have a main blog at mackuba.eu that I've been running since 2008 (!), on which I mostly post very long articles that take a week or more to write & edit, like "A complete guide to Bluesky" or "Introduction to AT Protocol", but I also have been writing some shorter posts this year on a separate "miniblog" on micro.blog – I wrote a bit about this here in February:

What I like about micro.blog

The idea when I started the microblog was that by having a separate place for "less serious" posting, where I need less effort to start and have lower expectations myself, would help me post shorter things more often, without procrastinating on articles for weeks or falling too much into perfectionism. And I think this has worked out pretty well – I wrote 7 medium-sized blog posts there this year.

In general there's a lot to like about micro.blog:

But to be completely honest, not everything worked well for me…

What I don't like about micro.blog

I think a lot of problems stem from the fact that micro.blog is really some kind of a mix between a social network and a blogging site, or a blogging site that tries to be a microblogging service (in their defense, it's right there in the name…). Like I wrote in the post from February linked above:

(…) that's sort of a hybrid between a blogging platform and a microblogging social network. You can write anything between full-size blog posts and tweet-sized single messages, and you can cross-post them to Bluesky, Mastodon etc. You can also follow people from the community that’s formed there and reply to them, all in the form of those mini-blogposts (there are no likes or retweets though). The idea, as I understand, is to use a network of blogs to build a social network that uses the web itself as the foundation.

This base idea spills into a lot of the UI/UX of the service – some of the sections of the site don't make much sense to me there (e.g. a timeline of my replies to people fetched from Bluesky, or of replies to me on Bluesky), and it makes some other things hard to find because of how everything is organized. For example, the new post page doesn't show a title / categories / description by default, because it's optimized for tweet-sized posts – the title field only magically shows up once you cross a ~300 characters threshold (!), and for other fields you need to dig under the "…" menu button.

Also:

I don't want to trash the service too much, because like I said, Manton is a good guy who is putting a lot of heart into it, and I wish him and his business all the best. It probably works great for those using it in a different way than I did, it's just not perfect for what I need.

Leaflet

So I'm really excited to start using Leaflet myself too. Of course it's a much less mature service, and it has many limitations and things missing – e.g. more theming/styling options (I'm not a fan of this monospacey font) – but I know they're working on this, so I'm hoping to see some new features added regularly.

What I like about it so far:

Like @quillmatiq wrote here:

I love the user experience, the way highlight sharing works, and, of course, the ATProto integration. In short, I'm using Leaflet because the whole package makes me want to use it.

I managed to import all my posts from micro.blog using this Markdown-to-Leaflet importer by @sharpmars (with some manual tweaks):

So you can see them all on the home page here: lab.mackuba.eu. I'm leaving the micro.blog version up at journal.mackuba.eu for now, but at some point I'll set up redirects in Nginx for those 7 posts to the versions here (unfortunately Leaflet uses a different scheme for URLs, so I had to pick a different domain name since otherwise old links would break, and I don't like breaking old links).

Don't expect any very regular posting here like weekly retrospectives or something – but hopefully I will be able to write some not too long post here every couple of months or so, when I have something to share.

PS. In case you're wondering why "Reports from the Martian Base" – it's because martianbase.net & lab.martianbase.net 😉