Subscribing to publications via atproto

We added a way to subscribe to publications via atproto!

This has two main parts:

a "subscription" record, which lives in your PDS and represents the subscriber to publication relationship

a custom Bluesky feed we generate, unique per user, linking to new posts in any publications you're subscribed to

How it works: writers

Share your publication; people can subscribe from its homepage or from any post.

When publishing new posts, you now have an option to post to Bluesky — this is what will show in subcribers' feeds, but you can turn off per-post if you like.

How it works: readers

Subscribe to any publication, and you'll see a link to add the "Publications" feed in Bluesky!

That feed will show any new posts from publications you follow.

Here's an example!

Our friend Jake is writing a wonderful new publication, Dreaming at the Edge of the Apocalypse, on theories of craft, interfacing with the natural world, cultivating community and more

He's written three great posts already — follow it here:

Dreaming at the Edge of the Apocalypse

Current limitations

there is not yet a way for creators to view subscribers to a publication, but we're working on it!

posts you've already published (before we shipped this feature) won't show in subscribers' feeds

for readers, the main limitation right now is the need for a Bluesky account, but we want to support email subscriptions too (see below)

What was easy / what was hard

Surprisingly easy: creating Bluesky records, and getting data e.g. to see if users already have the feed added.

Surprisingly hard: oauth / managing auth state across custom domains…turns out this is a pain!

Why we started with atproto subscriptions

We wanted to focus on things that play well with Bluesky, as the largest (by far) existing atproto community, and do subscriptions in a way that's good for network effects in the atmosphere broadly.

Custom feeds are cool, but definitely not as direct a way to notify readers when you publish. More like RSS than push notifications.

We think both atproto and email subscriptions are important for what we're trying to do — atproto for social stuff; email for direct audience relationship.

What's next for subscribing?

other things that leverage the atproto social graph — like an in-app Leaflet feed, or ways to explore what friends subscribe to

subscribing by email — important, but comes with challenges both in UX and (potentially later) making costs sustainable

for readers, an open q if there's something cool we can do that's more integrated with atproto but still as solid as email…maybe in the future!

Anything else we should add or consider here? As always we'd love to hear what you think.