Back when Twitter imploded under the weight of new ownership, I initially fled to Mastodon. It was a reasonable choice at the time as it had some momentum, the techie/geek users that I wished to follow and interact with were mostly there, and the federated nature of Mastodon and Activity Pub were appealing to me as a fan of the open web.

But Mastodon growth generally stalled after a time and it never went mainstream. The inherent flaws of the federated nature of Mastodon meant that the “average” user just couldn’t figure it out. The whole server thing, weird apps, toots, alt text zealots and other factors limited Mastodon.

Then Threads came along and for a time it seemed that it had a shot to take over from Twitter and become the next big short post social network. Meta leveraged the massive scale of Instagram to build a user base quickly and the said all the right things about federation in order to appease the nerd types who really wanted to continue to use Mastodon, but also be able to interact with users over on Threads.

I went all in on Threads and it was good…until it wasn’t. I never liked Meta, and it’s CEO/founder. I put aside all those feelings and “trusted” them and their claims that they wanted to be a good social network and an upstanding member of the fediverse. And for a time, it seemed they did. But Meta is Meta and I just couldn’t stomach being part of it all anymore. So I deleted my Instagram and Threads accounts and decided to give Bluesky a go.

Bluesky is interesting, to say the least. It’s really the AT Protocol that’s interesting, but Bluesky is the front-end for ATProto and a bit of a poster child. At first, I was put off by its origin story as a Twitter project that had the support of Jack Dorsey. But Bluesky is not part of Twitter, and Jack hasn’t be involved in a long, long time.

To me it feels like a nice mashup of Mastodon and Threads. There’s an interesting and open protocol at it’s core like Mastodon and Activity Pub. But there’s also a very polished official app which is more akin to Threads. The app ecosystem is more like Mastodon than Threads with multiple different third-party apps out there doing interesting things like photo sharing (Flashes) or feeds (Surf).

The list of interesting projects being built atop the AT Protocol is long.

And then there is Leaflet.pub. This one is particularly interesting to me. It’s an open source tool for shared writing and social publishing. What does that mean? Right now you can create a blog or “publication” on Leaflet and post to it. It’s also something like a Notion/Google Docs hybrid where multiple writers can collaborate on documents and publish them online.

Yes…it’s a little different and maybe a completely new paradigm. From a Bluesky perspective, Leaflet publications are very interesting. They utilize the AT Protocol - posts on your Leaflet publication live on a Personal Data Server (PDS) which is the same thing that powers Bluesky. I won’t get into the nerdy details but with Leaflet, you can now create a blog (and soon a newsletter) atop your Bluesky account. Neat.

In fact, this post lives both on my micro.blog and also on my Leaflet publication. I can see a future where Leaflet is my website, a publication is my blog and Bluesky is my social network. Super interesting!