A Change In The Atmosphere

With the announcement on the A New Social blog that Bridgy Fed — which has been helpful in syndicating my Fediverse posts from Ghost to Bluesky — was bringing longform to the Atmosphere, I found myself wanting to play with some of the current blogging tools running on AT Proto.¹ Unfortunately, even with the aid of a super-smart LLM, I couldn’t get the standard.site integration (which allows longform) working. I was either getting errors that I was missing the domain parameter when using my ActivityPub account or a 404 when I was using my domain account. Damned if you do…

My failures to integrate Ghost raised the question of the return on investment I was getting from the exercise. The benefit would have been that my posts would be syndicated to the feed with other standard.site documents. Bluesky itself is not part of that feed. Long-form platforms Leaflet, pckt, and Offprint are, but their reach so far is fairly limited. I was curious, though.

I set up an account with pckt, which was exceptionally easy due to the fact that authentication is built from the Atmosphere, and I could just use my Bluesky account (which is also my domain name — neat). The service is well thought out, and I think for a lot of people, it has the right mix of features. I was able to make some quick color scheme/typography customizations, although I’ll always wish there were more options. It’s a very bubbly selection that kind of screams fun. The flip side of that is that it doesn’t seem fit for serious blogging. Perhaps more disappointingly, other than the auth and appearing on the global feed of blogs with standard.site integration, the only sign of Bluesky here is your handle linked in your profile. It would be cool if you could syndicate posts to Bluesky or show comments from that network.

Next, I tried the new beta of Offprint. I was immediately struck by how similar the default theme looked to Substack. Offprint is going more for publications than basic blogs. Its options reflect that approach, with a lot more there to customize. Offprint also has better integration with Bluesky, allowing you to syndicate your post upon publish and even tag Bluesky/Atmosphere accounts in your post (that’s a nice touch). Offprint still feels very unfinished, though. Tagging isn’t even there yet, though it is coming. The interface also seems a bit corporate.

I haven’t yet dipped into the world of Leaflet, though Jay Graber (CIO of Bluesky) is apparently using that service. It appears to have a bit of the whimsy of pckt with better integration with Bluesky (recommends, mentions, and comments).

These are early days, and at the moment, I’m not completely sold on any of these services. The Atmosphere seems to be gaining momentum, though. Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider recently attended the AtmosphereConf 2026 to keep up with what people are doing with AT Proto. This is certainly a space to keep an eye on for anyone interested in online publishing.

1. AT Proto is the protocol that runs Bluesky and a competitor to ActivityPub, which runs Mastodon. The Atmosphere is the AT Proto version of the Fediverse. ↩︎