Leaflet FAQ
What even is a leaflet???
Leaflet is an Atmospheric platform for creating and publishing blogs and newsletters. We believe in flexible, powerful and above all social tools for writers and creatives.
Here are examples of great publications!
- Leaflet Lab Notes
- Fray In The Veil
- Debbie's Blatherings - by Debbie Ridpath Ohi
- Aaron Ross Powell
Explore and discover more publications in our Reader!
And learn more and try us out here.
The Basics
Leaflet is a platform for creating and publishing blogs and newsletters. We believe in flexible, powerful and above all social tools for writers and creatives.
Here are examples of great publications!
- Leaflet Lab Notes
- Fray In The Veil
- Debbie's Blatherings - by Debbie Ridpath Ohi
- Aaron Ross Powell's Blog
Explore and discover more publications in our Reader!
What's special about Leaflet
Leaflet is focused on powerful, flexible, and intuitive tooling.
We believe diversity is a pillar of publishing, and we're building a product that can support artists, writers, and creatives in everything they want to accomplish while still being accessible for everyone.
Publications on Leaflet are social.
When you publish with Leaflet, your post is automatically part of Atmosphere, the same social network that powers Bluesky. That means your work gets syndicated, not just to our reader, but to ALL Atmosphere readers by default. New audiences can discover, subscribe to, and engage with your work from wherever they stumble across it.
Some reader apps you could use include
- Leaflet Reader
Our in-house reader, convenient and easy to get to. It features an inbox for your subscriptions, as well as new and trending feeds - Pckt Reader
Pckt Blog's reader. It also features an inbox and lots of options to explore trending and popular publications and posts - Standard Reader
A minimal and easy to use Atmospheric reader app that makes it easy to read and search publications
Your content and your subscribers are yours.
They're REALLY yours. We don't store it in our database. The data lives in your Atmosphere Account (that's probably the account you made when your signed up for Bluesky). You can view and manipulate it with a tool like PDSLS.
If you are dissatisfied with us, you don't need to export anything because it's already yours. Just stop using us, and pick an Atmospheric competitor to start using instead. When you log in to that competitor with your Atmosphere account, you content and subscribers will just be there automatically.
How is that possible? It's because we're built on the Atmosphere! Read more about the Atmosphere here!
It means that Leaflet is powered by the Atmosphere, using Standard Site.
What's the Atmosphere?
The Atmosphere is an ecosystem of social networking apps that all use Atmosphere accounts.
Bluesky is the flagship Atmosphere app. You actually made an Atmosphere account when you signed up for Bluesky! When you sign in to Leaflet (or any other Atmosphere app), you can, and should, use your Bluesky handle, because that's your Atmosphere account!
Atmosphere Accounts are two things!
- A handle, or username.
- A big folder, like a Google Drive. Every time you create/like/subscribe/etc on an app, a file is added to your folder recording what you did.
Atmosphere apps read the files in your folder to show you experiences like a Bluesky feed or a Leaflet publication.
Having many many apps built on top a single huge network of accounts has big advantages for you!
- All the apps share the same log in. How convenient!
- The apps integrate well with each other. Leaflet knows who you follow on Bluesky, and Bluesky knows which Leaflet publications belong to you. That makes experience between us as seamless as possible!
Read more about the Atmosphere here!
What's Standard Site?
Remember that Atmosphere accounts contain a big folder with lots of files that record your activity! Standard site is a type of file in that folder. It's for publications/blogs/newsletters.
Google Docs and Microsoft Word read .docx files. Excel, Numbers and Sheets read .csv files. Leaflet, Pckt, Offprint, and any other newsletter/blogs/readers claiming to be Atmospheric read and/or write Standard Site files.
This standard file type means that can any Standard Site blog can be automatically syndicated to any Atmospheric reader and display nicely. For those used to the online publishing world, the effect is similar to RSS.
Unlike RSS though, Standard Site also allows readers to subscribe and recommend to blogs and blog posts directly from a reader app. This means you can meet people where they are, be discovered via the network, and more easily collect subscriptions.
Most of Leaflet is free!
That includes:
- Unlimited publications and posts
- Customization, theming options, and custom domains
- Rich block based text editor with lots of content types like image, sub pages, embeds, polls, math and code blocks
- Comments, quoting, recommending, and all other social features
- A reader for reading and discovering new Atmosphere publications
- Subscriptions via the Atmosphere
- Subscribers will be notified of new posts in whatever Atmosphere reader they use. They can also create a custom feed to pin to their Bluesky homepage.
- Distribution and Discovery vis the Atmosphere
- Your posts will automatically be syndicated into any Standard Site reader, where people can discover and engage with it.
- COMING SOON, Paid Membership! Sign up for the Alpha here
Some features are only on available to the paid tier ($12/mo or $120/yr)
Our paid tier is geared toward publishers looking to seriously grow their audience. We offer:
- Email subscriptions, send updates directly to subscribers' email
- Analytics, traffic, top referrers, subscription counts
- Group publication, invite others to contribute to your publication
The Neighborhood
Leaflet is a blogging and newsletter tool, like Substack, Ghost and others. We handle publication pages, memberships, email updates, and have a great text editor and interface for drafting and publishing posts.
Substack
Like Substack, Leaflet is easy and intuitive to use. You do not need any technical background at all. We provide tools to layout and theme your publication home page, and an editor to rich posts with lots of rich content like text, images, sub-pages, and embeds.
Also like Substack, Leaflet values the social context your blog lives in. Unlike Substack, we're built on the bustling Atmosphere, the network that Bluesky is built on, with tens of millions of accounts.
Work published on Leaflet automatically syndicates to all Atmosphere readers. And people can discover, subscribe, and engage with posts directly from their reader of choice, like:
Of course, in these early days, our network is not yet as robust as Substack’s. But there are real benefits to being an early adopter!
Ghost
Like Ghost, Leaflet is open source, and your data and subscribers belongs entirely to you. We don't own, or even store, your published content or subscribers. We cannot lock you into our app, it's not technically possible. You can leave Leaflet at any time, and you will not need to export your data because we never had it, you do! All that data lives in your Atmosphere Account!
Read more about the Atmosphere here!
What makes Leaflet special
Leaflet has the ease, discovery, and social network of Substack and the openness and ownership of Ghost.
On top of this, Leaflet is committed to powerful and flexible expression. We value diversity, and believe in supporting a rich landscape of publications. We focus on theming, rich content types, and social integrations while still being simple enough for anyone to use!
Leaflet posts and publications are discoverable through RSS. In addition, they are built on top of the Atmosphere using Standard Site.
Standard site is an open publishing protocol, like RSS. It allows compatible readers to syndicate posts and publications. Unlike RSS, it's built on the Atmosphere, allowing it to have associated identity data.
That means that logged in people can subscribe, like, discover, and engage with syndicated posts directly. That new subscription will still belong to the original publication, while meeting the subscriber where they are, dramatically lowering the barrier for discovery and engagement!
Leaflet and Bluesky are totally separate products built on the Atmosphere. You can think of us as two separate plants in the same soil. We use the same technology, the same accounts system. We integrate with each other and are stronger together. But ultimately we are two different entities.
Leaflet is for Atmospheric newsletters and macroblogging, and Bluesky is for Atmospheric short form microblogging!
Leaflet and Bluesky are both apps on the Atmosphere. That means we can easily share data and build lots of integrations. We're always looking for new ways to work together!
On Leaflet,
- When you publish a post, your byline automatically links to your Bluesky account.
- Anytime someone links to your post on Bluesky, we aggregate that into a nice section at the bottom of your post
- A reader can highlight any portion of your post and see a button to quote it within a bluesky post.
- You can @ mention any bsky account, or standard site post/publication in your post
- You can embed bluesky posts, and see replies and likes to that post without leaving the app.
On Bluesky
- Links to Leaflet or other standard site posts render a special card
- There are plans to add an “articles” tab in you prrofile that aggregates your standard site posts
- There are plans to deliver notifications if someone comments/subscribes/replies/etc to your publication (which that can be muted of course!)
Getting Started
Getting started is a quick process, it takes seconds to create a new publication and minutes to publish your first post!
Check out this video for a detailed tutorial
Getting started is a quick process, it takes seconds to create a new publication and minutes to publish your first post!
Check out this video for a detailed tutorial
On Leaflet, it's possible for multiple contributors to post to a single publication!
If you've received an invite, check out this tutorial!
If you have an existing newsletter or blog, and want to move to Leaflet, we can help you do that!
Please email us at contact@leaflet.pub with
- Your handle
- The name of your publication
- Your exported subscriber and content files
How to get your subscriber and content files:
- Substack
- Ghost
- Beehiiv
- Buttondown
- Anywhere! If the platform you use isn't on this list, just email us and we'll work with you to figure it out.
Note that email newsletters are a Leaflet Pro feature. If you want to keep your email subscriber list, you will need to get Leaflet Pro ($12/mo for the first 1k subscribers). You cant import your content even as a free user though! Just email us!
More about Leaflet
Your data is 100% yours.
It lives in your Atmosphere account. Thats probably the account you made when you signed up to Bluesky. Read more about Atmosphere accounts here!
The data is hosted by whatever service you made your Atmosphere with, again, probably Bluesky. However, Bluesky can't change your data without your explicit permission.
If you don't want Bluesky to host your data, you can move it all to a different Atmosphere account service if you like! Once you move, everything will work exactly the same as it did before. They only thing that will change is where you host your data.
We're always happy to hear from you! Here are the various places you can reach out or find out more about us!
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