Blogging with Bluesky and the AT Protocol

Without a doubt, WordPress remains the world’s most popular blogging tool. But as WordPress has continued to evolve and grow more feature-heavy, it could be argued that it’s lost some of its blogging focus. Fortunately, several excellent alternatives exist for those who simply want a way to post and share their thoughts online.

But the field of blogging tools continues to grow apace, and one of the more interesting areas is related to the Bluesky social media platform. Or more accurately, the AT Protocol that undergirds Bluesky. Bluesky itself is a microblogging platform where one can publish short posts up to 300 characters in length. But if you want something long-form that’s connected to your Bluesky account and the broader “Atmosphere” — i.e., the ecosystem of interconnected apps and platforms that runs on the AT protocol — several solid options exist.

Leaflet

Developed by Hyperlink Academy, which bills it as “a lightweight collaborative publishing tool for quick tiny docs that can grow into rich creative surfaces,” Leaflet offers several approaches to publishing online.

Right off the bat, you can create standalone documents that are basically functional webpages containing text, images, media embeds, and other content types. These can be nested inside each other as subpages, enabling you to create wikis, multi-branch essays, and other interconnected webpages. Leaflet also supports canvases, which are freeform whitespaces where content is laid out via drag and drop. Canvases can be used to create visual documents like mood boards (example) and can also be embedded within documents.

You don’t need an account to create documents and canvases, and they can be shared with others (example). One of Leaflet’s biggest features is collaborative writing; you can share a document with friends and colleagues who can then work on it alongside you. However, if you want to publish documents and canvases on your own domain, you’ll need to sign up using your Bluesky account.

Once you’ve created a Leaflet account, you unlock a more traditional blogging experience. You can create multiple publications (e.g., blogs), and publish long-form posts on them to your heart’s content. Like standalone documents, posts can contain a wide variety of content types, as well as nested subpages and canvases. And like documents and canvases, posts can be collaborative.

Leaflet offers a number of styling options to customize the look of your documents and publications, including colors and font choices, along with support for custom domains. And if you sign up for Leaflet with Bluesky, anything you publish on Leaflet can be automatically shared on your Bluesky account. All of this is wrapped up in a very stripped down interface that’s unlike many other blogging tools. On the one hand, that means less visual clutter, which is always a nice thing. On the other hand, it can be hard to find things, like a link to Leaflet’s documentation for those times when you’re stuck.

Leaflet is free, but upgrading to Leaflet Pro (currently $90/year) unlocks additional features including in-depth analytics and the ability to send posts via email. Leaflet currently does not support paid subscriptions, but it’s in the works.

Offprint

Even the most cursory look at Offprint makes it readily apparent that its biggest inspiration — and clearest competition — is Substack. Which makes sense, given Substack’s prominence and popularity.

Like Substack, publishing on Offprint is quite easy once you’ve signed in with your Bluesky account. Offprint’s editor is very minimal and simple to use, though it also possesses a block-based approach that should be familiar to WordPress users, and supports all of your basic content types. Unlike Substack, though, Offprint doesn’t support different post types, which Substack uses for things like podcasting.

Offprint offers some basic design customization options (e.g., colors, fonts). If you want to unlock more options, though, you’ll need to upgrade to a “Pro” account, which is currently $52/yr. Indeed, upgrading to a “Pro” account unlocks a suite of additional features, including email newsletters, custom domain support, multiple publications, and additional content management features like standalone pages and components (e.g., chunks of content that can be included in multiple places on your publication).

As of right now, Offprint doesn’t support paid subscriptions. According to their FAQ, however, “reader-funded subscriptions and other monetization options are on the roadmap” and will presumably be offered to “Pro” users first. That does raise the question of whether Offprint will take a cut of credit card transactions à la Substack, or if they’ll be more like Ghost and just charge monthly fees only.

All in all, Offprint is a very sleek, modern-looking CMS with lots of potential. However, I worry that their visual similarity to Substack might be something of a liability, especially until they offer more top-tier publishing features like paid subscriptions. True, Offprint’s killer feature is that it runs on the Atmosphere, giving authors more control over their content. But for non-technical writers, bloggers, etc., will that be enough? In any case, I’m excited to see Offprint’s continued development and how they tackle these issues.

Pckt

Compared to Leaflet and Offprint, Pckt looks, well, a little goofy. Case in point: When I access my Pckt admin area, my drafts are displayed in a Comic Sans-type font. But everything about Pckt feels very casual and purposefully designed for people who just want to blog without needing to worry about anything remotely technical.

Pckt does have some limitations, though. Free users are limited to 15 posts/month, one active blog, and 5GB of storage. But Pckt offers two paid tiers that offer varying levels of monthly posting activity as well as custom domains, analytics, and unlimited media storage.

Regardless of your tier, Pckt’s publishing interface is very inviting and unimposing. Like the aforementioned platforms, it offers a wide range of content types to flesh out your posts as well as the expected design customization options.

That said, everything about Pckt — its design, tone, etc. — seems very much geared towards casual and personal blogs. In other words, if you’re looking to launch a media empire with subscribers and whatnot, then Pckt probably isn’t the platform to use. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. Pckt clearly knows its niche and where its focus lies, which is making blogging an “inviting and playful experience.”

On a related note, I really appreciate Pckt’s own blog, which maintains the friendly tone in product updates and announcements. But they’ve also posted one of the most concise explanations of the Atmosphere that I’ve read; it’s a perfect primer for AT Protocol newbies.

I’ve known about Leaflet for awhile now, but I recently discovered Offprint and Pckt while researching Standard.site, a new lexicon for encouraging, supporting, and promoting longform content on Bluesky and the AT Protocol. Again, that might not matter to many bloggers, but I think it speaks to the flexibility of the AT Protocol (which, full disclosure, I’m still wrapping my head around).

One thing I do appreciate is that there seems to be a decent level of camaraderie between all of these platforms. Sure, they’re technically competitors, but they also share a lot of the same goals when it comes to interoperability and author independence. And apparently, they even help each other out with branding. There’s something really attractive about that sort of collaboration, especially given the often cut-throat nature of tech and social media.

In all, I continue to be impressed with the sheer — and ever-growing — diversity of easy-to-use content management systems and blogging tools that are now available. There’s really never been a better time to start blogging and take control of your online experience.

Note: Several other longform publishing platforms exist for the AT Protocol, including WhiteWind and Lemma. However, WhiteWind no longer seems to be in active development. As for Lemma, which was formerly called Pipup, it feels very stripped down compared to the above platforms.

For starters, there are no design or theme customization options that I could find. As for its editor, it relies heavily on Markdown, which is certainly functional but not quite as user-friendly as, say, Offprint’s editor. And it has some odd UX choices. For example, once you publish an article, there’s no way to un-publish it; you have to delete it and start all over.

In all fairness, though, Lemma does seem to be in active development, if their roadmap is any indication. A “Pro subscription” feature is currently in the works, along with plans for custom domains. It’ll be interesting to revisit Lemma in a few months to see how it’s matured as a platform.