We made it! augment has officially moved over to a self-hosted site, and I’m so excited to tell you all about it.
I’ve always wanted augment to be a space that I could write, but more importantly, I wanted to be a canvas where I could imagine what blogging can look like when it becomes a social space. One where published posts don’t just sit to be seen, but commented on, interacted with directly, and become a portal to spaces where it’s being shared so you can discover more.
I don’t want it to be a place you arrive; I want it to be a place that can expand that takes you to other places.
An Atmospheric Blog
In an essay I wrote recently, I spoke about an “Everything Account” and how it lives in an ecosystem of services called the Atmosphere. While that focused on the end-user experience, one other component of the Atmosphere is that all the data created in it lives in an accessible space that anyone can pull from.
This means I can publish things like blog posts into the Atmosphere, and then I can keep track of different services people are using to interact with them.
- I can look at posts and comments being created on microblogs like Bluesky and Blacksky and have them at the end of blog posts so you can engage with them
- I can peek at collections it’s being added to on services like semble.so and show them here so you can see what else those collections contain, and follow them if you want to
- I can display annotations that are being added to it on margin.at and seams.so and add them alongside this post so you can find insightful readers and follow them for more
- I can link macroblogs on Leaflet, pckt, Offprint, and GreenGale that mention my blog posts or my posts in different reading experiences like Skyreader
Over time, as the Atmosphere grows with more services, I can entangle this blog with them. I can make this a living, breathing website that grows with everyone who interacts with it across the open social web.
To begin this work, I’m starting with having every essay I write here publish to the Atmosphere using standard.site. This makes all of my posts native to the ecosystem, allows readers to subscribe using their Atmosphere account, and lets the them find it on macroblogging services across the Atmosphere. You’ll also see comments below this based on who’s replying to my microblog announcing the post on apps like Bluesky and Blacksky. Right now, you have to go to a platform to reply; eventually, I want readers to be able to reply directly below the blog post using their Atmosphere account. More on that soon.
The exciting part about this is that we’re also adding standard.site into Bridgy Fed. This means they’ll soon show up on ActivityPub-based services like Mastodon, WordPress, Ghost, NodeBB, and so many more, and I can pull bridged comments from that ecosystem onto this site as well.
augment is an Atmospheric blog that’s tapping into the wider open social web, and it’s only just the starting point. We can go so much deeper, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with how deep we can go.
An Open Foundation
But this didn’t come from scratch. The new augment lives on the work of multiple projects, and I want to take a moment to call those out.
- The site is forked from Chiri, an Astro theme that I ever-so-slightly customized to my needs
- The newsletter is now distributed via Buttondown, an email service that simply takes my RSS feed updates and sends them to your inbox
- standard.site is a longform standard built by the Atmosphere longform community, kicked off by Offprint, Leaflet, and pckt
- The standard.site integration is setup using Sequoia, a CLI tool that enables subcriptions, sends the blog post and a microblog to the Atmosphere when it’s published, and brings microblog comments back to this page so other readers can see it
None of this could’ve been possible without the hard work of the people behind these projects.
I’m also open sourcing this blog on GitHub and Tangled, a GitHub competitor built on atproto where I’ll eventually host the repo myself. That means that as I add new features and make it more Atmospheric, you’ll be able to see how I’ve done it, and can either use that code or use it as inspiration to do the same.
Wherever You Read Your Blogs
You’ve probably heard the words “wherever you get your podcasts” a lot. It’s a common starting point for folks to understand open standards.
Well, starting today, you can read augment wherever you read your blogs: your email inbox, your RSS reader, the Atmosphere, and (soon) the Fediverse.
Subscribe where you want to read it. And hopefully, over time, I’ll make it worth you while to come here, because it’ll have so much more than just my ramblings.
Welcome to the new Atmospheric home of augment. I’m so excited to show you more.