Leaflet stream

Telling my readers that open protocols matter feels like preaching to the choir, so I mostly don't focus too much on it. However, I think this story is worth flagging because it is such a clear signal of what's to come for 2026:

The CBS News show 60 minutes was going to air a story about the men who have been deported from the US to the El Salvadoran concentration camp CECOT. This story was killed last minute by the new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss for blatant political reasons.

The story was however broadcast in Canada, which lead to it being recorded and distributed online.

The episode of around 12 minutes (confusing show branding tbh) is now available to be seen on Bluesky:

CBS and its owner Paramount are trying to take the story down, filing takedown requests on copyright ground.

People on Bluesky were commenting (1, 2, 3) about how this relates to fascism, that news unfavorable to the government have now to be smuggled into the country and distributed in manner that is resistant to censorship, drawing historical parallels.

I think these comparisons are broadly correct, and also set up for what's to come for open social protocols. This will not be the last news story that the US government will try to take down, in collaboration with legacy media organisations.

This puts open protocols like atproto in a new front line: it can be used to distribute news and reports that are unfavourable to governments that are trying to prevent the news from getting out.

The technical implementation of atproto is fairly capable of resisting takedown pressures. The practical reality of virtually everyone using Bluesky to access the atproto network creates a massive singular focal point for governments to apply pressure to take down certain content however.

I'm expecting that we'll see more of these dynamics in 2026. Atproto provides a place for sharing news stories that are taken down on the Big Tech platforms. This usage will likely increase pressure on the Bluesky company by governments to take down unfavorable political content.

Bluesky is not the only microblogging atproto platform anymore however, with at least four projects that are setting up their own atproto infrastructure to build an interoperable microblogging network. Blacksky is currently the furthest along with this, but other projects are looking to create their own spaces as well:

Gander just passed their crowdfunding target, raising over 1.7M CAD from over 2100 investors, to build a Canadian social platform on atproto.

Eurosky just announced that in January they will offer Eurosky PDS hosting, their first step for European infrastructure on atproto.Northsky is starting host the first group of people on their own PDS as well.

Having multiple platforms that are interoperable with each other on the same network leads to two challenges that I'm watching in 2026:

The geopolitical aspect of handling political content. Above I suggested that Bluesky might get pressured by the US government to remove political speech from their app. How will the dynamic on the network evolve if these posts can still be viewed on the other platforms, whether that's Blacksky or Gander?

Bluesky currently has a reputation for highly aggressive comments and replies around certain contested topics such as AI or the economy. I think this is a signal that people experience platforms like Bluesky as a digital place, and that they care that the prevailing opinion in this place aligns with their own personal viewpoints. For topics like AI, where opinions diverge massively and are highly contested, this leads to very aggressive posting and reactions, not only because people disagree with each other, but also because they are contesting the 'Bluesky' space on what will be the prevailing opinion regarding these topics.

My current thinking is that the introduction of multiple interoperable spaces on atproto will lead to even more conflict and aggressive posting on the network, especially for subjects around AI. Now it becomes important for people that the dominant opinion on Bluesky aligns with their own opinion, but that this happens on Northsky and Eurosky as well.

Because posts from a Northsky PDS are visible to Blacksky users, and vice versa, it means that the "place" being contested isnt a single app, but the shared network layer instead. Because all projects make the entire network layer visible, it means that a conflict over whether Bluesky is pro-AI or anti-AI also automatically is a conflict over whether Gander is pro-AI or anti-AI. The stakes become higher, as people can more strongly identify with a specific app/platform. But because that app or platform contains the access to the entire network, and only provide different windows to the same underlying conversations, there's no actual retreat. You can identify as a Gander user or a Eurosky user, but you can't escape into a separate discourse. This results in the emotional stakes of platform identity get combined with the inescapability of a shared network layer.

So what happens when the identity of an atproto platform and wider network culture move in opposite directions?

Last week saw a lot of discourse in the community of atproto devs about how to handle (heh) the login screen for atproto-enabled apps, and how to communicate the login flow as clearly as possible to a wide audience. There are challenges regarding how to communicate to a wide audience what their domain/handle/username/internet handle is that they can put in the box, as well as how to communicate clearly that this is all based on an open network that's more than just Bluesky.

For an overview of the conversation itself, I think this article by Chris Shank is great:

He concludes:

Chris gets to the core here: what is on one hand a fairly obscure discourse about UX design, also displays much of the underlying questions about politics and power that go with building new social platforms on open protocols.

I'm curious how the following will develop in 2026:

• How will the developers of various atproto apps collaborate, compete and communicate on aspects of atproto and interoperability? So far this mainly happens via posting on Bluesky with largely in-crowd people, how will that dynamic evolve? Here it's also worth looking at the fediverse and ActivityPub for some lessons, where involvement with protocol development was highly structured and formally open to everyone, but in practice dependent on a tiny group of self-selecting people. What will become the infrastructure for atproto to have these conversations?
• What will actually be a good way to communicate important information about atproto to regular people? There's quite a few aspects on accessibility to incorporate here, as well on language more broadly. On one hand, there is a universality in the claims and suggestions for login screens. This is especially noticeable with 'internet handle', suggesting your atproto identity for the entire internet. But at the same time, many of the suggestions are build around the @ symbol, and the wordplay in English with AT. This works well enough in English, but for a universal suggestion it needs to be able to be used a a global majority of people who don't speak English.

Finally some musings about my own work: you might have noticed I've been experimenting new ways to share information about the ecosystem. I've been building my own website to share links that are on-protocol:

For early next year I'll be continuing with the experimentation. For most of the year I've been focused on being complete, giving people a full overview of the ecosystem. But as developer activity around atproto is picking up, this becomes both less practical and less useful.

For 2026 I'll be focused more on the curation aspect, and experimenting with new ways you can use the affordances of atproto to curate and share information about the network.

Besides that, I'll continue to write regular longform analysis, as thats what I enjoy doing.

Thanks for reading this year, and for all your support, it is greatly appreciated!

All the sessions of last week's Eurosky Live conference in Berlin are now available online, here.

One main takeaway I've heard repeatedly: the event effectively demonstrated that atproto is more than Bluesky. From conversations with policy professionals working to reduce Big Tech's power over social networking, a key hesitation has been whether atproto is too closely tied to a single US VC-funded startup. The conference combined both policy-focused discussions, as well as more tech and product demos. This combination was effective at showing the policy community that atproto is more than just Bluesky and microblogging, and that people are working on the ecosystem from multiple angles: building sovereign platforms (Gander, Northsky), combining multiple protocols (Sill, the reader client which combines both Bluesky and Mastodon was effective for this) as well as expanding drastically what open protocols can do (social coding with Tangled). This made Eurosky an effective trust-building exercise for alleviating some of the concerns that the ATmosphere is more than just Bluesky.

For another writeups, see this by Mathew Lowry, and this coverage by the German news outlet RND.

Bluesky has handed out grants to various people building atproto projects. Bluesky has not formally announced all the grant receivers, but at least the following people have said they received a grant:

• phil for building microcosm, a collection of independent atproto infrastructure projects
• mary for atcute, a collection of typescript atproto packages
• Bailey Townsend for PDS MOOver, a set of tools to help with PDS migration.
• Whey for Red Dwarf, a Bluesky client that skips an AppView entirely and connects directly to the PDS layer of the network.
• Chad Miller for Slices, a set of developer tools that makes it easier to build and backfill AppViews.
• Kuba Suder for various atproto projects, such as sdk.blue, which Suder talks about in a recent blog post.

Bluesky has announced that they are working together with stopNCII.org (NCII = non-consensual intimate imagery). StopNCII works by letting people create hashes of images on their local device, and upload the hash (not image itself) to the StopNCII dataset. If the Bluesky app detects images with the same hash, their moderators can decide to prevent the images from being posted on the app.

People are asking some critical questions in response to the announcement, with the main concern being that this might be weaponised to censor other images. People want to know how StopNCII guarantees that the hashes submitted to their database actually correspond to images owned by the submitter, and not by other sex workers, for example.I think these are good questions to ask, and I could not find a clear answer to this directly on the StopNCII website. Hash-based systems inherently require trusting submitters, since the hash itself cannot reveal whether someone actually owns the content they're reporting, but StopNCII's site doesn't clearly explain what verification steps, if any, exist to prevent abuse.

It also shows that Bluesky is in a fairly unusual position: Major Big Tech platforms use the StopNCII dataset, including Meta's platforms, Reddit, TikTok, OnlyFans and Pornhub. As far is I can find, none of these platforms announced the collaboration directly to their users, and it only seemed to have been limited to corporate channels. Bluesky in contrast has a much more direct relationship with its user base. Every newly announced policy can become a public discourse, which is both a feature and a challenge, and it means Bluesky must publicly justify safety measures that competitors adopted years ago without explanation.

New_Public spoke with Gander CEO Ben Waldman about how they are building a Canadian social platform, using atproto. The entire interview is worth reading, with one part I want to highlight. The sovereign Canadian part is deeply integrated into Gander's identity, and while it started as a result of Trump's threats to annex Canada, there is more to it. Waldman:

Gander is explicitly working on reclaiming their own cultural voice outside of the US. So far, while I'm seeing similar voices in Europe for the digital sovereignty part when it comes to matter of ownership and control over infrastructure, the cultural influence part is getting less attention. At the Eurosky Live conference, why it matters that Europe has control over their social networking infrastructure is framed as opposition to Big Tech's control and negative impact that it has. And this is all true, but Europe also does have the same issue that Waldman refers to above: social media culture is heavily influenced by the US. Its not all that unusual to meet people here in the Netherlands who have a more detailed understanding of the latest outrage in US politics than they do have about the latest outrage in Dutch politics. Gander is expanding the framing of sovereignty to explicitly also include culture. Europe's push for digital sovereignty could take a page from that playbook, since the issue is just as relevant over here.

Bluesky has been pushing the adoption of the platform with the sports community, and it has become successful enough that it is now apparently the Baseball app during the World Series. The next community that Bluesky is working on onboarding is finance, and the team is collaboration with Graze to build custom feeds for Yahoo Finance for earnings reports.

There has been a lot more news (mostly tech-focused) that I'll write about in another update either tomorrow or Friday. Thanks for reading!

I'm writing this update on the train back from the Berlin Eurosky Live event, and it was amazing to see so many people in person, had a great time with all the sessions and meeting so many great people! Shoutout to the organisers (Sebastian, Sherif and many. more) for a great event, and for bringing both policy people and the developers building a new social networking ecosystems together into a single coherent conference.

A recurring theme at Eurosky Live, especially from the policy side, was on how Europe can take back control from Big Tech platforms over the social networking infrastructure. This created a dynamic where open social protocols are framed as a tool to be used in a conflict with the Big Tech platforms over control of the current social networking ecosystem. But these open protocols create their own power structures in their own right, that are not reducible to just conflicts with Big Tech platforms.

Robin Berjon's opening keynote session had a interest perspective on this, and he referenced social scientist and Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom, with a slide saying:

That quote stuck with me, so instead of a news report about the event I'm giving in to the brain worms that tell me to write about how this thinking (protocol architecture and institutional governance are the same thing) relates to Bluesky making some changes to their reporting system.

Bluesky has updated their reporting system, with more reporting options:

The update expands the reporting system, going from 6 reporting options to 39. When a person files a report, they are first asked to select a category (like 'violence', 'adult content'), and then within that category a variety of new options show up.

Bluesky says that "this granularity helps our moderation systems and teams act faster and with greater precision. It also allows for more accurate tracking of trends and harms across the network."

One example of the newly added option to flag human trafficking content, where Bluesky says that this new option is "reflecting requirements under laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act". This option is implemented globally, not just in the UK.

This creates a new dynamic on social networking, and illustrates the thinking of Ostrom that Berjon referenced his Eurosky Live presentation, on how the architecture of a protocol and the institutional rules are the same thing.

The modular nature of atproto makes content moderation is one of the many components of the network, that can be individually implemented and operated by any service. This gives jurisdictional flexibility, as the protocol does not enforce specific categories of moderation, it is determined by the jurisdictions a service operates. This architecture enables different services to make different choices about the different categories for reports, creating technical conditions for a wide variety of implementations.

But these same affordances for flexibility also give Bluesky the discretionary choice to apply the UK regulatory requirement network-wide. This is an active choice, Bluesky and atproto have an entire system for geo-specific moderation (see my deep dive on that system here), but Bluesky judged (correctly, imho!) this harm matters globally and should be an individually reportable category everywhere.

This choice matters, as Bluesky's dominant role in the ecosystem means that their choices shapes the choices that other moderation services in the ecosystem make as well. Other moderation services building on atproto will likely adopt similar structures, and user expectations about what "should" be a reportable category get shaped by Bluesky's choices.

This is where the thinking by Ostrom that Berjon referenced in his presentation at Eurosky live comes back in, where "the properties that define the architecture of a protocol and those that define the rules in an institution are the same". From a user's perspective, the reporting UI is the moderation architecture they experience. There's no meaningful distinction between "the protocol" and "the governance" from their standpoint.

I don't think this is a technological determinism, atproto does not determine governance outcomes. But from a user perspective, they are effective the same thing however, as how the protocol is implemented is the governance they experience. You cannot meaningfully separate the protocol architecture from how it is institutionally implemented.

So when Bluesky implements regional laws on a global scale, and when new moderation services on atproto are incentivised to follow Bluesky in implementing the same reporting categories, regional laws can shape global networking norms. This happens via an intermediary step: regional laws shape the dominant service's choices, which in turn shape ecosystem norms. This is an emergent property of open protocols, and the reason why protocol architecture becomes equivalent to institutional governance.

This matters for how we think about the political project of building alternatives to Big Tech platforms. We do need to constrain Big Tech platform power. But by doing so we create new systems where the decentralised protocols don't eliminate power dynamics, instead they get reconfigured in confusing, fun, illegible, and exciting new ways.

This is the second part of this week's news, you can find yesterday's report here, with news of Ganders fundraiser and how atproto governance is in the process of being housed at the IETF.

Semble.so is a new knowledge sharing platform on atproto, build by the Cosmik Network team. It allows people to create collections of links, organise them into 'collections', and see what other people having been gathering. Semble takes clear inspiration from platforms like are.na or Sublime.

The platform is launched in alpha, and in the Lab Notes the team give an overview of other planned features, including further integrations with other atproto platforms such as Bluesky and Leaflet, which they discuss in more detail here:

I've been using Semble quite a bit over the last few days, and I'm really enjoying it. Sharing interesting links and seeing what other people are sharing is a style of social networking that fits with my style more than microblogging, so its nice to have a place for that now.

I'm especially interested in how this space of interoperability between different platforms like Semble and Leaflet will evolve. There is a large amount of potential here, and the openness of atproto allows for rapid experimentation.

Other people are excited to build on this too, and here are some 3p extensions for Semble

Bluesky suspended the writer Sarah Kendzior for three days, saying that she broke the rules last month by posting a death threat.

I don't hold a strong opinion on the case itself, but I do think two things are worth flagging here:

First is head of T&S Aaron Rodericks stating that Bluesky making a public statement is part of a shift towards being more transparent:

Second is that Gizmodo thought this case to be worthwhile enough to write an entire article about it:

I'm not particularly interested in litigating whether the suspension was justified. What interests me is that this made it into Gizmodo, specifically because Twitter's cultural relevance partly came from its role as an assignment board for journalists. If a writer getting a 3-day suspension on Bluesky can now generate enough feed chatter to prompt a full Gizmodo article, then that signals to me that Bluesky is starting to take over that function from X.

Bluesky COO Rose Wang also commented that they'll be more open and share more information about mod decisions going forward. But I think another part of why this is important is somewhat hinted at in this post by Wang:

One of the goals of atproto is to have multiple providers of moderation that people can choose between. This will inevitably result in provider A making a different decision than provider B. In such a context of plurality staying silent on decisions simply is not an option, especially when it is unclear if the difference in choice is because the TOS is different or the interpretation of the alleged violation is different.

On a related note, Rodericks also wrote about Bluesky's moderation process this week:

Wafrn and Red Dwarf are two projects/platforms that are interoperable with Bluesky, while being fully independent, as well as not following the protocol architecture that Bluesky follows. This gives them more flexibility to add their own features.

My main interest here is in seeing platforms develop that are both interoperable with Bluesky and Bluesky's lexicon, while also adding unique features. How interoperability works in such cases is not yet fully defined, and it is just developers experimenting and figuring out what works best.

(another example of interoperability with Red Dwarf)

And an interview with the developers of Wafrn:

And an explanation of how Wafrn's integration with Bluesky works:

Another new atproto platform this week: music streaming with Plyr.fm. It has the basic functionality of a Soundcloud-clone, but executed well on the design and features.

Wisp.place is a new platform that allows you to host a static site on your PDS. Your PDS contains the site, while wisp.place reads the site from your PDS and servers it through a CDN.

I think using the PDS to host the data of a static site is a highly under-explored part of atproto, and I expect to see more experimentation in this field. Personally I hope to have some time in the next few weeks to hack together something similar for my own personal site as well.

A more technical description of wisp.place here:

An excellent long-read interview with Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold:

Lots of good insight in there, and one I'll highlight:

Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee has some thoughts on protocol design, and is looking for feedback. It is about a fairly technical part of atproto, but it does have meaningful consequences, as Frazee points out. Recommended for people who have opinions about protocols to take a look at this, there are some interesting tradeoffs involved here.

Alex Benzer, head of product at Bluesky, wants to know if people are interested in a Twitter archive importer:

To get a sense of what the wider culture's perception of Bluesky is:

New features and design for event planning app Smoke Signal:

Gander Social, a Canadian atproto-based social media platform currently in private beta, launched an equity crowdfunding campaign through FrontFundr at the end of October. The campaign positioning itself as an opportunity for Canadians to co-own a social media platform built on values of digital sovereignty and independence from surveillance-based business models. Within hours of launching to their Early Access Program, Gander surpassed $500k CAD in investments, and within a week reached over $1 million with more than 1200 investors. Gander is planning to use the funds for hiring engineering and trust and safety staff, developing creator monetisation tools and moderation systems, and supporting a public launch planned for 2026.

Gander sells common shares starting at $255 CAD, and aims at a target raise of $1.5M CAD, with a valuation of Gander of $15M CAD. With more than a month to go, the campaign has raised over $1.3M, and an additional 400k in investments that are likely to close.

This financial model and valuation means that Gander is already explicitly thinking about sustainable ways to generate revenue, and their pitch is feature subscriptions. The core app and functionality is free, and comes with a single account. A paid version features multiple accounts, and unspecified 'additional features'. Gander also is focused on enterprise and professional users, with features like branded accounts and team collaboration tools, as well as sponsored content.

What strikes me about Gander's crowdfunding is that it has not been a major part of the conversation on the atproto-focused dev communities on the feeds. Gander's first Bluesky post about the campaign came only after 1,500+ Canadians had already invested over $1.2M CAD. Gander's promotional material does not mention Bluesky at all, and sparsely mentions atproto, and the integration of Gander in a wider open public network is hardly mentioned.

It shows that Gander has found significant traction among people who aren't yet active on atproto platforms. They've built momentum outside the existing Bluesky community, which suggests broader interest in atproto-powered social media beyond its current user base.

Gander's crowdfunding shows that digital sovereignty sells to people who might not be already active in the space of open social networking protocols, and indicates that sovereignty framing is a viable funding path for platforms targeting populations with strong regional identity, independent of whether those populations are already bought into open protocol ideals.

Bluesky has set their first official step to get (part of) atproto governed by the IETF. The Internet Engineering Task Force is the place where internet protocols become "official standards" through a formal but open process that requires multiple independent implementations and broad technical consensus, and also manages protocols like HTTP, DNS and OAuth. The first step for atproto is to host a 'Birds of a Feather meeting', to indicate interest from the community and if the IETF is a good fit for atproto.

This meeting, held last week, saw presentations from various organisations that are building on atproto, and an explanation of Bluesky which parts of atproto they want to bring to the IETF

Bluesky plans to start with the core part of atproto, and the components that become IETF standards (like the repository data structure, CBOR encoding, and firehose mechanisms), any changes would require working group approval. This means Bluesky couldn't unilaterally modify these foundational pieces without going through the IETF process. However, IETF has no enforcement power - it's a voluntary standards body. Implementers choose whether to follow the standard.

The crucial part here is that the application layer remains outside of the IETF, and app features (and the schema systems that power them, such as Lexicons), are not part of the IETF. This gives people building on atproto flexibility, which the plumbing of data synchronisation stabilised as commons infrastructure.

This first meeting was not to determine if the IETF would form a Working Group to house atproto. I'm not a professional IETF watcher (or maybe I am now?), but my sense is that the closing comments of the IETF chair person indicated that things went well, and atproto is on a good trajectory to potentially become an IETF standard in the future.

(full video of the meeting for all my protocol sickos here)

Bluesky is a baseball app now:

Bluesky is also the Zohran Mamdani app now:

During the NYC Mayoral election night, Bluesky partnered with Graze and NYC newspapers Gothamist and WNYC to create a custom feed for the election. This feed had curated content, posts from trusted soruces, pinned posts with the latest results, and more. Graze says that the feed had over 110k unique readers, and a peak traffic of 1,200 posts per second, doubling Graze's previous monthly high.

There is a ton more news this week (the launch of Semble.so, for example), that I'll get to in another edition of ATmosphere Report in the next few days.

When people talk about decentralisation in the atproto ecosystem, the conversation almost always centres on Bluesky. Conversations on decentralisation are messy at the best of times, but the strong focus on Bluesky and microblogging make it even more complicated. Decentralisation describes two different things at once: a technical architecture for how networks are structured, and the actual behaviour of people using those networks. Because Bluesky is so central to atproto, the social dynamics of hosting >99.9% overwhelm any technical dynamics that atproto provides regarding decentralisation.

Blogging platforms like Leaflet and WhiteWind offer another lens for understanding decentralisation and atproto. The blogging and writing platforms built on atproto operate on a much smaller scale, there are multiple distinct players in the space. None of these players dominate the field in the way that Bluesky dominates the microblogging side of atproto. By examining how these different platforms interact with each other, we can see some of the decentralisation dynamics of atproto that are harder to see by looking at Bluesky.

The first player on the scene was WhiteWind, which was also the first major alternative project on atproto besides Bluesky, and launched in early 2024. The platform offers a simple markdown-based editor, a homepage that shows popular and most recent articles published using WhiteWind. There are also some integrations with Bluesky, with Bluesky posts that talk about the article visible below it.

The developer for WhiteWind however has stopped further work on the platform for a while now, leaving the space open for other writing and blogging platforms.

Leaflet is a blogging and publishing platform that started development in the summer of 2024. Only in May 2025 did the platform become really integrated with atproto. In the half year since, Leaflet has quickly become the most popular blogging platform on atproto, and it is actively seeing further development. Leaflet is a block-based editor, that does not use markdown. Leaflet is now also starting to move towards the social side of blogging, with its own comment section (that exists outside of Bluesky), a reader feed that shows all recently published Leaflet posts, and a discovery page for finding other Leaflets.

What I find noteworthy about Leaflet is how quickly it is managing to find a user base of early adopters that is not tech people talking about the tech itself (like yours truly). Of the 20 Leaflets that were published in the last 24 hours, 3 were about atproto itself. Instead there are posts about football, politics, short stories, personal diary blogs, or overviews on how someone is putting a film camera on a boat. That many the blogs talk about things other than tech is a very healthy sign for the future of Leaflet.

PiPup is a recently launched platform for long-form writing on atproto, that focuses creating blogs with Markdown. It supports a wide variety of specialised tools, from creating interactive math charts to sharing music with ABC notation and code syntax highlighting. The platform launched with a tool to convert WhiteWind posts to PiPup posts. It also has a reader feed, but where the Leaflet reader feed only shows posts made on Leaflet, PiPup's feed shows posts made with WhiteWind, Leaflet and PiPup.

Another example of a writing and blogging app that's currently in development and that looks very promising is Offprint. Their current work can be seen here. Offprint also explicitly mentions monetisation as part of their platform, advertising Offprint as "Write, monetize, and own your audience without the middleman." Pckt.blog is blogging platform that is currently working on atproto integration. Weaver is another long-form writing platform for atproto that is currently in development, and has gotten a grant by Graze for the work.

Together, the various long-form writing apps create a new market for blogging on atproto, with a very different dynamic between them. Instead of one company that works on the protocol and also hosts virtually all users, there are multiple competitors all building in the same space. The Apps act more as collaborators than as competitors however. It gives some insight in what decentralisation and interoperability on atproto actually looks like when there are multiple different apps all working towards the same objective, without one company being overwhelmingly dominant. Some observations:

• Due to how atproto works, you can create posts on any of the blogging platforms without actually using the platform. This is as simple as publishing blog post to your PDS, using their lexicon. This makes it that there is a distinction between using the blogging platform (by logging in to Leaflet for example) and using their lexicon (publishing a post to your PDS that uses the same lexicon). The nature of long-form blog posts make this use case much more likely than with microblogging. For example, people have been building personal websites with posts on the website using the WhiteWind lexicon, without interacting with the WhiteWind platform (and thus not agreeing to the WhiteWind ToS). There is not yet clear language to reflect this: do people do who this use WhiteWind or not?
• Interoperability is an active point of concern between the developers of the various platforms, and something they are collaborating on. Because the writing formats of each platform is by definition open, interoperability is always an option, and if the platform developers themselves don't support it, other third-party developers might add it themselves.
• Leaflet is the first blogging platform that allows people to follow a specific publication, creating a 'following' relationship that exists outside of Bluesky. I'm curious how the other apps will respond to this? Create their own form of following writers on their platforms? Will we see a move to a shared lexicon for following blogs? Or another option?
• Because text is fairly simple format to work with, competitive interoperability is also an option. An example of this is how PiPup has created a tool to import all your WhiteWind posts into PiPup as well. Other tools by external developers to import WhiteWind posts into Leaflet also exist. In a well-developed ecosystem for long-form writing on atproto it seems highly likely that there will be easily accessible tools to port posts in every lexicon to every other lexicon.
• Long-form writing and publishing platforms combine multiple different functions: the writing and publishing part, and the social function (commenting on a post on Leaflet), and the discovery and distribution part (the reader feeds on PiPup and Leaflet). This allows for further disaggregation in the future, and I would expect services that are dedicated only to the discovery of blogs to pop up. Such discovery services have an incentive to aggregate from every long-form writing platform. This creates a dynamic where the discovery services want to treat posts by the different platforms as much the same as possible, while each individual platform wants their post features to be different and unique from the other platforms.
• Moderation remains one of the most challenging problems of any social platform, and that is no different in the space of blogging. Both Leaflet and PiPup have fairly lax rules around which content can be published on their platform. It is unclear what, if any, moderation systems they currently have in place. The challenge of moderation becomes even more complicated since the use case of publishing to a platform's lexicon without using the platform itself. The blogging platforms are also moving into the space of discovery and providing 'reader' feeds, and how they will moderate blog posts that they show on their platform remains an open question.
• The existence of multiple different blogging platforms gives an indication of what the incentives for decentralisation actually are on atproto. When a platform like WhiteWind stops development, that does not result in other people setting up their own version of WhiteWind. Instead, people start building their own software for the same market. There is no real reason to run your own version of Leaflet, but there is an incentive to build another publishing platform that is compatible with Leaflet but also has other features. A similar dynamic is visible on Bluesky: there is little incentive to run a direct copy of the platform, but platforms that are interoperable but can also offer something new (Blacksky, Gander) are able to find their place on the network.

I continue to think that the field of blogging and long-form writing on atproto is the place with the most potential for growth of the atproto network, and there is a ton of exciting experimentation and building happening in the space. I'm curious to see how this will further develop.