Ideas for publication discovery

We've been thinking about discovery for Leaflet publications, and recently posted about this and got some good conversation going!

I want to summarize some ideas we have — and ones you shared — for how we might go about this.

Simple solution: feed of all Leaflet pubs

Right now it'd be great just to have some cool examples to point to, but we also want to think about what might scale.

One simple approach is making a global feed of publication activity. It could be all posts, or all pubs ordered by most recent post activity.

This might be a little chaotic but could work at our small scale. I think we'd want to at least have some threshold or heuristic to filter out the many people who just make a quick test pub / post.

Curatorial lens: "Discover" page

Rather than a feed, we could make a more browsable collection of publications. This could be manually curated, or filterable somehow. I think we'd at least want basic heuristics like (for pubs) having a certain number of posts, or (for posts) a certain number of likes.

One thing to be cautious of here is doing this in a way where we strongly curate / editorialize, that could imply an endorsement of content, whether done manually or with algorithmic suggestions.

Explorable publications: an active browsing interface

I like the idea of something that's explorable — not editorialized, but also not just a naive list of all pubs.

It should be fun to browse, and give users choice in how to traverse the universe of publications. It'd be especially cool to have nice ways to filter for things in your own social graph, like:

ways to find all mutuals or friends of friends pubs…

surfacing posts liked or shared by people you follow…

We could even have a way to expand out say from just mutuals to friends of friends or your wider network.

Less about what we recommend, more about what friends recommend or engage with. This could still be done in more or less opaque ways, but I think it's ideal if it's always clear why you're seeing something.

Leaderboards: ranking publications

We could make something that aims to surface popular publications, showing e.g. pubs in ranked order by how many subscribers they have, or (once we add this) which have more quotes shared to Bluesky, or the most likes, or similar factors.

This has similarities with explorable publications, but could be a more global version, with less focus on your personal connections to others in your network — which is why I like it less overall.

Random discovery: simple serendipity

A couple people mentioned and I like this idea because it's simple and fun, kind of like classic Stumbleupon!

We could have basically a big "randomizer" button that takes you to a random post, and you can click it as many times as you like. I don't think this should be the only way to browse / discover pubs, but it could be a fun simple addition.

Time for some experiments…

We'll probably try one or more of these directions soon. I think there's more to explore with in-app feeds, but we could try a very simple global feed to start. I also like the idea of an explorable browsing experience based on your social graph.

To get enough overall activity to make any of these fun, we may need to give people a bit more time to play around, and try some things to encourage more publishing. I think this could be a nice complement to a summer writing club!

Down the road we can try related things like a way to recommend other publications, or a more high-signal way to endorse each other. I like the suggestion of author-added tags for posts as well; it'd be interesting to see what kind of blogging folksonomy emerges.

Lots to play with, and given the open nature of the network, others can try making alternatives here too!

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Thanks to those who contributed to this discussion on Bluesky — @schizodelusion.bsky.social , @tachyoneddies.com , @o.simardcasanova.net , @prefetcher.miku.place , @3pol.bsky.social , and @derzquist.net