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").

Home | Alexander Bulimov: Production Engineer and Scale Modeller

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!

Germ Network

Share what you want to, when you need to, on Germ DM. The only messenger with multiple profiles, no phone numbers, and end-to-end encryption.

Tangled

The next-generation social coding platform.

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

Atproto for distributed systems engineers - AT Protocol

AT Protocol is the tech developed at Bluesky for open social networking. In this article we're going to explore atproto from the perspective of distributed backend engineering.

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:

Leaflet Reader app ( https://leaflet.pub/reader )

in your Bluesky timeline, mixed with other posts

in your personalized Leaflet-only Bluesky timeline ( https://bsky.app/profile/leaflet.pub/feed/subscribedPublications )

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?

RSS feed at https://pzmarzly.leaflet.pub/rss . There's no button anywhere to go to it, but it is linked in HTML via a tag. RSS is awesome, use it. I recommend Inoreader as the reader app.

The above, but through RSS-to-email service. E.g. Feedmail or Feedrabbit .

Email service by Leaflet. Recently launched by Leaflet team, it's a great option for aspiring Leaflet writers, and I was going to set it up. But! It costs $12/month, which is not great when I aim to send 1 post a month to 10-20 people.

Set up Zapier / IFTTT / n8n to observe my Bluesky profile. That also costs money, but it costs YOU money, so all OK for me.

Keep checking the site every now and then? The good old Web 1.0 "surfing".

[low tech option for friends] Tell me explicitly to keep you updated, and I'll DM you (on WhatsApp, Signal or Gmail) with links to all new posts.

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.

Test

And LaTeX?

LATE​X

And green yellow red highlighting.

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