Towards Leaflet for Fandom

We're starting to see people in fandom communities using Leaflet, which is both an exciting indicator we're reaching more folks beyond atproto early adopters, and interesting from a product perspective!

There are lots of things unique to fandom, but also lots we can learn that may generalize to building blocks and features that benefit all communities, from organizing and discovering content, to the reading experience and beyond.

This is our third post in a series exploring ways to improve Leaflet for different communities in the atmosphere. It's a living document; please share your thoughts and we'll update as we learn more!

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Special thanks to bisprout for beating us to the punch and sharing this great post with lots more thoughts on Leaflet for fandom:

thoughts on leaflet for fandom - sprout speaks

nothing says "social writing" more than fandom imo

We'll highlight many of their ideas below, but definitely worth reading that post in full!

Social publishing for fandom

Shout out to Kat and Ms Boba for sharing their knowledge and experience about how fandom communities work, and how longform publishing platforms could better serve their needs.

We met Kat at a recent NYC atproto meetup and chatted more by DM about Leaflet and the intersection of fandom, tech, and publishing! Things like tagging and discovery and community curation…

We also talked with Ms Boba about the desire for social spaces with more personality, and making publishing spaces your own. And, of course, more about the importance of tags and content policies. Impressed with her work bringing nontechnical participants to the table in shaping discussions around new social protocols and tools!

Tags for conversation and community

Several folks have told us how important tagging can be for communities to identify and discover work. Kat put it like so:

for fandom, tagging and organization is critical. we as fans LOVE to self-identify and label through any means -- it's why we at fujocoded push for the labelers because fans LOVE shit like it. 88x31 buttons, deviantart stamps, anything like it. but tags count in this too because they allow us to organize and label and warn for things in our works. they also allow us to express ourselves

Really appreciate how tags can serve as both organizational affordance and expressive surface! On Tumblr, to take one of the best known examples, tags are not just labels but an expressive part of posts, a kind of conversational side channel.

Felicia shared some thoughts on tagging too:

It feels important to make tags semantically flexible, e.g. not just hashtags but allow multiple words, long tags, punctuation, etc. Simple (probably not a nested hierarchy for example) but flexible enough to make your own emergent hierarchy if needed.

Being able to click tags from a post and see other posts with that tag globally and within the current publication ideally would be great.

Customization and expressivity

Another common thing we hear is how much people love making something their own, from bespoke structure to visual look and feel.

We've got some fun things going with theming, but there's a lot more we can explore here! From bisprout:

I love the theme and customization options for Leaflet so far, but would love to see just a liiittle bit more. Maybe having an additional one or two font color options, and font size options beyond just headers and paragraph…

Agree this would be nice! One thing we plan to add soon is more font options. Per-post and per-block theming options could be great too. Maybe even theme elements tied to tags in some way?

Felicia also mentioned adding just a couple more text size options, which seems like a good idea.

Canvas is also currently quite simple and has lots of room for improvement, both with text handling and more visual options like shapes, arrows, or even freeform drawing options.

Content policies and moderation

A few people have asked about NSFW and content policies, e.g.:

Important to give this more thought! Tags will be helpful here; we may want something like a simple "NSFW" toggle as well.

Ms Boba emphasized that we should expect folks to push the limits here, so good to have ideas how we'll handle when they do.

We'd like to build on the Bluesky moderation stack, e.g. things like labelers, mutes and blocks, post gating and so on. We're looking at other tools like ROOST ("robust open online safety tools") as well.

For now — noting we plan to soon add a way for authors to moderate comments on their posts!

Navigation and content flexibility

It'd be great to have more flexibility in organizing content, both within a publication and within posts themselves. One example:

This came up as a suggestion in the context of webcomics too — ideally we'll add an option to have "prev" and "next" buttons as built in nav, without having to add buttons manually!

Easier internal links to other posts could be helpful too, for linking to sequences or related content (your own posts or others').

Some people are also interested in subpages within publications:

The good news here is we're planning to add subpage support soon; we want parity between Leaflet docs and posts in publications!

Homes for communities

How might we make it easier to create collaborative publications or collections for a larger community?

Tags will help for certain use cases; we're also thinking about something like a community publication or meta-publication that could collect posts from many contributors. Similar, from bisprout:

Another feature I'd love to see is collaborative publications. I know several writers who collab on projects by alternating chapters, so having a shared publication they can both publish to while retaining their individual @ would be great. I imagine this would also be nice for other formats of writing teams, like newsletters and such…

We plan to add a way to send a doc to a publication; if we do community pubs maybe we could add a way to cross-post i.e. add posts to more than one publication, too.

One other interesting thing Ms Boba mentioned: thinking about interoperability for writers to publish in many different places (whether Leaflet, A03, personal websites etc), and readers to have different views for browsing and discovery, reducing platform centralization.

Finally, we've seen a couple publications organized around fandom community events ( KRBK Events ; NuCarni Events ) — we love creative challenges as a communal format for making and exploring together, would love to see how we can support! Whether a basic thing with tags, or something like a collaborative publication…

And…adjacent ideas for docs / writing generally!

Separately from the publication use case, we can make Leaflet better for writing and doc-creation in general! Love this:

We agree! A couple specific suggestions from Felicia, in thread:

table of contents kind of nav in a doc

comments on docs (public ones soon; private…TBD?!)

more granular font size options…

Bisprout also had some good ideas around better anchoring comments and quotes to the text so you can e.g. view them by location in the doc (not just chronologically), and maybe even view a kind of "heat map" indicating where in the doc conversation is happening.

This, combined with anchored quotes, would have me simultaneously bouncing off the walls in excitement and on my knees sobbing in gratitude. It's like everything I've ever wanted as an author of fanworks, to be able to see where my readers were like !!!!! and then just pull up the quotes right next to the doc and scroll through and read their reactions alongside the text. I cannot overstate how badly I want this.

Into this! Feels like there's a lot of room to make something in between blog comments and Google Docs-style comments — both more conversational and more fun to use…

They mentioned the idea of user profile pages; that's also on our to do list! It'll probably start with a list of your content (publications, comments, etc.) but it'd be cool to add things like a blogroll / list of others you recommend, too.