Writizzy is now connected to the Atmosphere

When I started building Writizzy, I wanted to solve one problem with blogs: distribution.

Writing is easy.

Okay, maybe not that easy. Writing is a skill, and like most skills, you have to develop the habit. But at least the main obstacle is personal discipline.

But getting people to actually read what you publish is much harder.

That's why I've spent a lot of time building distribution features into Writizzy. Good SEO, RSS feeds, cross-posting to social networks, newsletters… All of these are different ways of helping your content find readers.

Another approach would have been to build a network of articles: one place where readers could discover content from everyone at once. That's more or less the approach taken by Medium.

The problem is that, with this model, your articles depends on the platform. The platform decides how your content is displayed, who gets to see it, and what happens to it over time. And, in Medium's case, they can decide to put content behind a paywall.

I'm not a big fan of that model.

When I started Writizzy, I actually tried a smaller version of it. I built Discover, a feed where readers could browse articles published on Writizzy without any algorithm and the content stayed on each blogs. But it wasn't enough, because Writizzy had no network effect.

So I started wondering:

What if Writizzy could connect directly to a network of tens of thousands of blogs and millions of potential readers?

That's what we're doing now.

Welcome to the Atmosphere

If you've been following the evolution of the open social web, you've probably heard about the Atmosphere.

Think of it as a galaxy of applications built around the same social network, with the same users.

The best-known application in that galaxy is Bluesky. But Bluesky is just one of many applications using the underlying network. (I’m personally using mu.social instead of Bluesky).

There are apps for social networking, news, forums, video, music, and increasingly, long-form publishing.

They all build on ATProto, an open protocol designed to make it possible to build different social applications that can still participate in the same network.

Blogging on an open social network

One of the things that makes ATProto particularly interesting for Writizzy is that it isn't limited to short social posts.

It can also be used to build blogging applications.

That's where site.standard comes in.

It's a standard for representing websites and long-form publications on ATProto. Different applications can understand the same blog posts, authors and publications without needing to be part of the same product.

Writizzy now supports this standard.

Which means that your Writizzy blog can be part of the Atmosphere.

Your posts can now also become discoverable through applications connected to this network.

Your blog, connected to a network

This is what I find exciting about this integration. Writizzy doesn't need to become a social network. We don't need to build our own audience from scratch. Instead, we can connect your blog to a network that already exists.

It's a bit like RSS, but with a social network built around it.

You publish on your blog, and other applications can discover and consume your content.

And because the network isn't controlled by a single application, new ways of discovering and interacting with your content can appear without Writizzy having to build all of them.

Your blog becomes a node in a network.

And your content still lives where it belongs

There is an important detail here.

Connecting Writizzy to the Atmosphere doesn't mean moving your blog to Bluesky or giving up control of your content.

Your Writizzy site remains the place where your content lives.

Your domain is still yours. Your website is still yours. Your articles are still published there.

The Atmosphere is simply another network through which your content can be discovered.

That's important to me because it's also one of the reasons I built Writizzy in the first place.

I don't want to build another platform where your content is locked inside a company.

I want Writizzy to help you build a home for your writing on the web, and then connect that home to the rest of the web.

This is only the beginning

Right now, the first step is making Writizzy blogs available to applications that understand site.standard.

But the possibilities go much further. I’m still thinking about it, so it’s not really a roadmap but here are a few ideas :

• Imagine a blog reader that lets you follow writers from across the Atmosphere.
• A recommendation engine that can surface great articles regardless of where they're hosted.

None of these applications need to be built by Writizzy.

That's precisely the point. The network is bigger than the product.

We can focus on building the best publishing experience we can, while letting an open network handle part of the distribution problem we've been trying to solve from day one.

If you want to connect to the atmosphere, go to Settings → integrations → Channels and add Bluesky channel.

Hugo