On Atmospheric Stacks…

I've been thinking for a long time about atmospheric publishing, from our work on @leaflet.pub to the ecosystem emerging around @standard.site, and how we can beat Substack at their own game.

Last month I did a talk at @atproto.nyc on Atmospheric Stacks — a new approach to building cohesive full-stack social experiences collectively in the Atmosphere.

This post is an adaptation/expansion, still a little messy, but you can watch the talk or skim the slides below for the TL;DR!

Also below: a couple addenda, still WIP, not included in the talk…

recording of my talk from @atproto.nyc 7.7.26

slides from my talk!

Intro

This talk is about how the Atmosphere can compete with successful incumbent social apps — not by recreating them app for app, but by, as an ecosystem, decomposing them and replacing them, collectively!

Replacing closed, proprietary stacks with open stacks.

I want to use the example of Leaflet, Standard Site, and the emergent longform social publishing ecosystem as an ongoing case study, and how we can continue to advance our shared mission to supplant Substack.

The problems we need to solve — together

Successful social apps typically combine:

• a bunch of features that work well together
• business model / incentive model that gets people coming back
• good product + good incentives = sticky network dynamics

The big issue: we don't just need feature parity. We need to solve the distribution problem, the social ecosystem problem, the "creators need viable businesses" problem!

We also need to face reality: incumbents have huge advantages. Resources, bigger teams, more $, and most critically, entrenched network effects.

So, it's an incredibly tall order for small emergent builders to replace a big successful app-slash-social-network like Substack — let alone a mega-platform like YouTube or Instagram — alone.

But…what if we do it together???

This talk is about what that means, realistically as well as aspirationally. What can we do today, where can we go, and how can we collaborate?

Atmospheric stacks: what's different?

In the Atmosphere, composability is a superpower.

(Just one that must be wielded carefully, so as to not…y'know, end up creating experiences that suck.)

Yes, this means more complexity and coordination costs. But the alternative is no coordination / interop at all. So, we figure it out!

The upside is collectively creating something more flexible, more powerful, more alive, and more resilient.

Something better for users and better for (non-monopolist) builders too!

• old stacks: skyscrapers — all the parts in one place, big but kinda boring
• new stacks: rainforests — many layers, diverse ecosystem, symbiotic, vibrant

New, Atmospheric stacks might look more like…

• several popular tools with an overlapping set of core functionality
• surrounded by a rich ecosystem of other tools and services with more specialized functions, experimental interfaces, and more
• ways for people to put these things together into cohesive experiences

Standard Site and an emergent stack for social publishing

As it happens we've got a great case study of an emergent Atmospheric stack for longform social publishing!

I'm going to talk about Leaflet and Standard Site and the wider atmospheric publishing ecosystem, vs. Substack, because it's a good example and I know it firsthand, and the "stack" thing in the name, but later I'll point at how a similar approach might work in other areas.

There's already a pretty complex ecosystem taking shape here, with lots of dynamics and potential for interop and other exciting things.

In some places we see coopetition, like those of us making Standard Site publishing tools. In other areas it's pure win-win symbiotic dynamics, like publishing + reading + social discovery tools that can interoperate. And lots of untapped potential yet to explore, like ways we can merge e.g. publishing and video tools into powerful experiences.

So, we're building new stacks here! Collectively assembled stacks! This one is for social publishing — not just web publishing, like WordPress, but publishing with a social network, which today is mostly: Substack.

What's Substack's…stack?

So, what makes Substack unique here? What's Substack's stack?

It's not one thing, but many! And although there are a ton of other publishing tools out there, this stack is a pretty unique set of things:

• great design
• blog (web) + newsletter (email)
• easy to customize
• easy to monetize
• free to publish
• social features that are nice to use
• social network, actual follow graph, newsletters + short posts
• strong cultural footprint, lots of use across many verticals
• strong brand, people are familiar with the model
• all in one platform
• long tail of advanced features (podcasts, livestreaming, guest posts, multi-author publications, etc.)

Sure, lots of competitors do, say, half of these things quite well! But right now there are basically none that match the full stack.

If this is too many things for any one of us to go head to head on all axes by ourselves…how can we tackle it collectively?

Oh yeah and it's a whole damn social network

First, just to hammer on one important point a bit more…

Key thing with Substack, and similar for other big social apps: it's not just a way to publish stuff, it's a successful social network!

Same for YouTube; you post there not just for the free hosting (though that's nice too) but for the distribution.

Substack's actually somewhere in the middle; most successful writers on the platform are coming in with their own audiences, and it's of course in Substack's interest to overstate the extra reach they get people…but it's not nothing, and exaggerated is very different from fake.

So, the stack we're taking on is a bundle of [publishing app] AND [social app], which, hey, is something atproto can be great for!

But the replacement, of course, looks rather different. For one, the openness of the ecosystem means you structurally can't lock up all the data and keep the network to yourself. Instead…

So, what's the new Atmospheric publishing stack?

How do we replace Substack? With a network of our own!

The replacement for Substack is not Bluesky, or Leaflet, or any single app…it's the Atmosphere!

The new counter-stack is an ecosystem!

• It's apps like Leaflet and pckt and Offprint…
• It's the wider Standard.site community…
• It's the entire Atmosphere…
• It's other channels like email and incumbent social networks
• It's the whole internet, if we can bring them onboard!

We can think of this as a many-layered circle of readers, writers, publishing tools, discovery surfaces, communities, utility / glue apps, and more:

At the center of the circle, we need to get creators active and give them powerful tools…

At the edges of the circle, we draw people in with cool new ways to find interesting things and read and engage with communities…

Activity ripples inward, activity ripples outward; we weave connections between layers, like some mycelial network…

Okay, let's get more specific!

How does my experience change?

What's different in a user's experience using the Atmospheric stack for longform publishing, instead of Substack?

In this world…

• It's possible for your experience to live within one app, but it doesn't have to
• People move between different apps, or use many, for different aspects of what they need
• Not everyone needs everything — there's more room for custom, personalized experiences, for both readers and writers
• There's a mix of common layers many people use, and more unique ones that cater to long tail niche needs — all in the same network

Let's contrast some flows in Substack vs. the new Atmospheric stack:

• Finding things to read
  1. Substack: social media or within the Substack app
  2. Atmospheric stack: social media, blogs, other pubs, custom feeds, reader tools x social graph, cross-app recs…
• Following / subscribing
  1. Substack: follow or subscribe in Substack
  2. Atmospheric stack: subscribe with atproto; email is secondary…and more like RSS, read and follow your subs in any app you like
• Participating in convo
  1. Substack: comments on posts; 'notes'
  2. Atmospheric stack: comments section, Bluesky, Blacksky, future private communities, other social apps…
• Starting a publication from scratch
  1. Substack: you gotta do it on Substack
  2. Atmospheric stack: on Leaflet, Offprint, pckt…or your own custom site!
• Building a custom API integration
  1. Substack: lol you can't
  2. Atmospheric stack: sure do whatever you like!

Sketching the new stack: parts of the stack we need to replace

Let's look again at the parts of Substack's stack — and lay out some specific things we might try with Leaflet and the Standard Site ecosystem:

• blog + email newsletter:
  1. many alternatives, including atmospheric ones like Leaflet and Offprint — one of the easy parts
• flexible and customizable:
  1. also many alternatives; hard to do well but still not the hard part
  2. Leaflet: themes, custom domains, lots of block types etc.
• clear way to make money:
  1. some alternatives, like Ghost and Beehiiv; harder to do well; Atmospheric alternatives are still WIP…but soon!
  2. can't overstate the importance of "HELP PEOPLE MAKE MONEY"
  3. interesting space here; Substack is actually pretty limited in this respect…much we can try besides the obvious paid subs model
  4. monetization + social network = lots of cool potential
• nice social features:
  1. varying degrees…Leaflet has comments, many apps have easy social sharing and recommendations (Standard Site)
  2. lots to play with here, but STILL not the hard part! because that's more about…
• strong network effects:
  1. critical for community, discovery, keeping people in the ecosystem — the Atmosphere has potential, but too Bluesky-heavy right now, far from realized…
  2. lots we can do with e.g. cross-publication recommendations, social graph aware discovery, and communities
• free to publish:
  1. basically no one else does this
  2. so…can we reduce the importance of free email? as a longer term goal, we can aim to mitigate that moat
• strong cultural footprint:
  1. the Atmosphere has a fairly diverse user base, but not enough; many areas where we need more big accounts or 'anchor tenants'
  2. need more verticals + more recruitment efforts…and of course this goes hand in hand with stronger incentive models!
• long tail of advanced features:
  1. things like podcasting, livestreaming, guest posts and multi-author publications, and beyond: less core features for everyone, but many things important for various creator niches and larger orgs
  2. great space for atmospheric opportunity; lots of cool integrations and interop if we team up across apps / lexicons
• strong brand / familiarity:
  1. the Atmosphere's in its infancy; some people know about Bluesky but basically no one knows about the wider ecosystem
  2. people do understand blogging, and the basic paid sub model, not only from Substack but Patreon, the New York Times, and so on, so we have some simple conceptual anchor points
• all in one easy to use platform:
  1. this flipside of making interop easy: great UX is still hard
  2. we have a ways to go to make Atmospheric stacks function legibly to end users as unified cohesive experiences, and not just kludgy assemblages (do NOT mention self-hosting or cross-protocol bridging when pitching people on a solution here lol)

Lots of cool stuff already!

As I said, it's still early and we have a ways to go here. The good news is there are actually a lot of cool pieces coming together already!

Some things are pretty serious and promising already; others are nascent or prototype phase but point at big potential later. We have…

• search tools like pub search
• bluesky's initial standard.site link card integration
• Wordpress has v1 of a plugin for atmospheric publishing
• Sequoia for publising a static site
• reader apps like Standard Reader and Skyreader

And of course the big three atmospheric publishing apps: Leaflet, pckt, and Offprint. All of us are doing some interesting things!

Recent integration with pckt + Marque, the atproto domain registrar, is a cool example. We'd like to make this happen in Leaflet too. Cool experiments that work can become patterns.

Standard Reader is a great example on the reader side, launched pretty recently and has shipped a bunch of new things quickly, including some more experimental stuff like a way to publish 'collections' with a more magazine-like reader experience, still compatible with Standard Site…

And lots more to explore…

There's lots to explore at all the layers of the stack, and I'm especially excited for more weird cool atmospheric stuff, things only really possible in this kind of open interoperable ecosystem.

We're at kind of the first stage of just getting close to having the basics in place for solid publishing tools / platform…

Pretty soon I think we can enter the second phase where we start to get a bit weird and see what unique things we can do together!

• Weird cool valuable publishing things:
  1. embeds with any app, universal backlinks, etc. etc.
• Weird cool valuable social things:
  1. deeper Bluesky integration, mentioning anything, more ways to comment and engage, finding things via friends / social graph, etc.
• Weird cool valuable monetization things:
  1. one-off purchases and other $ models
• …and things that combine all the above!
  1. like gating certain content w/ social incentives e.g. free or discount if you share, if > N ppl sub, etc.

A huge thing on the way is permissioned data and groups / communities, lots we'll be able to do there! Like we could make it so paid members of a Leaflet publication get access to private communities, and those communities can themselves exist across many places, not locked into a single app.

We can make this work not only with Bluesky, though that'll be one good entry point. We can do e.g. with communities on Blacksky or Acorn as well. Big publishers like The Verge can do it themselves, too!

To succeed here we've got our work cut out. We've gotta follow the money, build for communities, solve discovery…

We've gotta grow Standard Site a thousand-fold, let's say, as a start.

We've gotta try a whole lot of things, together. Let's get to it!