Towards Leaflet for Scientists

We'd love to make Leaflet better for scientists, and for that matter, for all academics and researchers!

There's a vibrant academic community — and many subcommunities — active on Bluesky, and we think longform publishing can be a natural fit both for public communication and exchanging ideas within these smaller communities.

This post is second in a series exploring ideas for Leaflet in the context of different use cases and communities. We'll treat it as a living document and update as we learn more.

Publishing and academic communities

A lot of the ideas here so far emerged out of conversations with folks we met at the recent NYC atproto community hack day — Ronen and the Cosmik team (building Semble ), and Sophie , who's making a really cool Bluesky custom papers feed . Thanks for the ideas! We'd love to hear from other scientists and academics.

Along with the ideas below, we're thinking about community tools broadly — things like tags and post collections or "meta-publications" that could curate posts from many authors, perhaps with corresponding custom feeds. Reach out if that sounds useful!

Annotations

Semble is working on a lexicon for inline annotations which sounds cool and may have some overlap with Leaflet.

We've explored some adjacent things with comments (our own lexicon) and quotes (for sharing highlights to Bluesky), and have seen some cool examples of annotation-like use, like:

Bates' Gedanken on Property Rights - leaflet.drewmca.net

A thought experiment that shows the primacy of property rights in economic systems

Or this one, making great use of our Bluesky post embed block to riff on ideas found via Bluesky posts:

A running list of ATproto ideas - Tynan's Leaflets

Updated when the brain has more

Something like post references is closely related — more below!

Maybe we can make things like quotes and comments more useful here as well. We also recently added quotes within comments — a way to point to specific parts of a post when commenting, which is useful for annotation and granular conversation.

Standalone docs

Right now Leaflet has standalone docs, but only publications are social and published on atproto. We soon plan to make it possible to publish standalone docs, which will open up more use cases.

This seems like a natural fit for e.g. publishing a working draft in a social context where you want to invite feedback from your follow graph, or even a case study or Q&A or…

For a more complex example, Nick made a syllabus with Leaflet:

(Actually two syllabi: How to Pay Attention and Introduction to the Anthropology of Science and Technology )

This takes full advantage of subpages for more structure — something like this could be very cool to publish in a way that e.g. only students could comment, or even edit, add pages, etc.

References and backlinks

Semble's thinking about trackbacking, inspired by the arXiv standard which sounds similar to a webmention, basically a backlink + notification; maybe we could do some kind of integration here.

One thing we definitely want to add is quoting posts across Leaflet, so I can link to your post in mine and you get a notification.

A similar thing between apps e.g. where we could notify if someone links to a Leaflet post in Semble, and vice versa, would be cool.

Making comments quotable or deep-linkable would also be quite useful for this kind of thing.

Related to all this, we need to figure out notifications soon!

Post reactions

Another idea Semble's exploring: extending post reactions, to support not just likes but e.g. custom reacjis.

It could be nice to have something similar for Leaflet posts; we've thought about adding 'likes' on posts, but it'd be fun to make it more customizable…reactions defined per-publication? We did a similar thing for Hyperlink with custom per-space reactions/tags.

Maybe we could share a lexicon here…

Publishing after PubPub

The open publishing platform PubPub is unfortunately winding down operations. Maybe there are things we can learn from or adopt there, see if we can build certain functionality into Leaflet.

We'd love to hear from any folks who use PubPub: what features do you find most useful, and might be cool to see us explore?

…and more!

Sophie noted some useful context about the ways academics post about their work online:

threads announcing their work on Bluesky / Twitter

blogging ( one example ; another )

hosting demos of short introductions of their work ( example )

And for the latter, she mentioned good support for photos and diagrams being really important!

We recently added embed blocks to better support e.g. media like YouTube videos; there's much we can do for nicer image handling, as well as things like file uploads.

Another recent addition: math and code blocks! Useful for things like talking about location data on atproto (code block) and explaining cryptographic signature schemes (math block), and we hope for a range of technical writing.

Finally, she had a great point about how Leaflet might help foster academic discussion, e.g. bridging longform content and more casual shortform conversation. Semble's exploring this and a lot of the above ideas might be helpful.

Also a good suggestion to check out alphaXiv — looks like they're doing some interesting work around a discussion space for arXiv papers (preprints), a mix of discovery + discussion forum + reading tools, may be worth a chat.