Everybody has a Leaflet, so do I!

Leaflet has really taken off in the recent months – it feels like everyone I hang out with in the ATProto community on Bluesky has one these days! There are so many people blogging now, that I started using an RSS reader ( NetNewsWire ) again after a very long break just to make sure I'm keeping up with everything.

My "ATProto" folder there looks like this, and as you can see by the favicons, the vast majority of those are on Leaflet:

I have a main blog at mackuba.eu that I've been running since 2008 (!), on which I mostly post very long articles that take a week or more to write & edit, like " A complete guide to Bluesky " or " Introduction to AT Protocol ", but I also have been writing some shorter posts this year on a separate "miniblog" on micro.blog – I wrote a bit about this here in February:

Micro.blog journal

Just a quick update, if you’re following this blog via RSS: I’ve started a separate “journal” blog on micro.blog: journal.mackuba.eu.

What I like about micro.blog

The idea when I started the microblog was that by having a separate place for "less serious" posting, where I need less effort to start and have lower expectations myself, would help me post shorter things more often, without procrastinating on articles for weeks or falling too much into perfectionism. And I think this has worked out pretty well – I wrote 7 medium-sized blog posts there this year.

In general there's a lot to like about micro.blog:

As I mentioned, it feels easier to start writing – I don't know how much of that is because of a text box on a website vs. a markdown file in a TextMate project of a Ruby app, and how much it's just that it's a separate place

The default theme (design/layout) you get when you start is really nice and clean looking, and there are many other themes to pick in the gallery

The post content is normal Markdown, with support for things like tables, code blocks with highlighting, fragments customized in manually written HTML, and so on

It can automatically cross-post to Bluesky and Mastodon

It pulls comments from Bluesky automatically from the firehose and shows them below the post:

It can automatically back up the blog content to a GitHub repo, although it does it in a really weird way

It's a bootstrapped small business, paid for with money and not with data, run by one developer who is a nice guy and cares about the blogosphere and the open web

But to be completely honest, not everything worked well for me…

What I don't like about micro.blog

I think a lot of problems stem from the fact that micro.blog is really some kind of a mix between a social network and a blogging site, or a blogging site that tries to be a microblogging service (in their defense, it's right there in the name…). Like I wrote in the post from February linked above:

(…) that's sort of a hybrid between a blogging platform and a microblogging social network. You can write anything between full-size blog posts and tweet-sized single messages, and you can cross-post them to Bluesky, Mastodon etc. You can also follow people from the community that’s formed there and reply to them, all in the form of those mini-blogposts (there are no likes or retweets though). The idea, as I understand, is to use a network of blogs to build a social network that uses the web itself as the foundation.

This base idea spills into a lot of the UI/UX of the service – some of the sections of the site don't make much sense to me there (e.g. a timeline of my replies to people fetched from Bluesky, or of replies to me on Bluesky), and it makes some other things hard to find because of how everything is organized. For example, the new post page doesn't show a title / categories / description by default, because it's optimized for tweet-sized posts – the title field only magically shows up once you cross a ~300 characters threshold (!), and for other fields you need to dig under the "…" menu button.

Also:

The post drafts aren't autosaved while you're writing them, which has bitten me at least once, because the latest version of Safari (26.0 on Sequoia) for some reason hangs and crashes for me about once a day now – I generally try to remember to click the "save draft" button once in a while, but not every few words

There is an integration with ActivityPub, which makes your blog available on the Fediverse as a separate entity like mackuba@micro.blog, which posts links to each blog post there and can be followed from Mastodon; but you don't control that account directly, and in practice, this has been really buggy for me: I wasn't able to successfully set or change the avatar of that account, test posts I've deleted stayed there and I couldn't delete them, and even when I reset/disabled that feature, the account didn't disappear from Mastodon. From what I heard, at least some of these issues are really problems with ActivityPub and/or Mastodon (which sounds completely believable tbh…), but I have no way of testing this myself.

You can cross-post to Bluesky and to your Mastodon account, and comments from Bluesky are pulled to under the post, but comments from your Mastodon aren't – from the Fediverse, only comments made under posts from that buggy separate ActivityPub account are listed (and the Bluesky comments are only pulled if you post to Bluesky from the micro.blog website, but not if you just post a link on bsky.app )

The embed cards when sharing links to a blog post don't look great, e.g.:

Images are kinda annoying to embed (again, I think the UX is optimized for tweet-sized posts with one or two images attached below)

Rendered markdown previews didn't always work well for me, neither in the web UI nor in the (native) Mac app, and I think there's no easy way to see a preview of a post in the actual blog layout & design before publishing it

The website takes a bit longer to load each page than I would like to, and the background job of building and deploying a new/updated post takes a long time too

I don't want to trash the service too much, because like I said, Manton is a good guy who is putting a lot of heart into it, and I wish him and his business all the best. It probably works great for those using it in a different way than I did, it's just not perfect for what I need.

Leaflet

So I'm really excited to start using Leaflet myself too. Of course it's a much less mature service, and it has many limitations and things missing – e.g. more theming/styling options (I'm not a fan of this monospacey font) – but I know they're working on this, so I'm hoping to see some new features added regularly.

What I like about it so far:

The UI feels pretty snappy

Has a lot of custom components you can put in the text, like full-width link cards (see below), embedded Bluesky posts, iframes, polls, "call to action" buttons, and so on

Looks like it's autosaving post drafts every few seconds

Fully "atprotated" 🥔 (© @oppi.li )

All the social features, like subscribing, comments, mentions/quotes, sharing highlights with the image previews, custom feeds with Leaflet posts from people you follow – all of which are built on Bluesky/ATProto

Like @quillmatiq wrote here :

I love the user experience, the way highlight sharing works, and, of course, the ATProto integration. In short, I'm using Leaflet because the whole package makes me want to use it.

I managed to import all my posts from micro.blog using this Markdown-to-Leaflet importer by @sharpmars (with some manual tweaks):

sharpmars.nekoweb.org/leaflet-md

CLI tool to sync your Markdown to Leaflet

So you can see them all on the home page here: lab.mackuba.eu . I'm leaving the micro.blog version up at journal.mackuba.eu for now, but at some point I'll set up redirects in Nginx for those 7 posts to the versions here (unfortunately Leaflet uses a different scheme for URLs, so I had to pick a different domain name since otherwise old links would break, and I don't like breaking old links).

Don't expect any very regular posting here like weekly retrospectives or something – but hopefully I will be able to write some not too long post here every couple of months or so, when I have something to share.

PS. In case you're wondering why "Reports from the Martian Base" – it's because martianbase.net & lab.martianbase.net 😉