Using semble for link blogging

I’m an advisor to the Cosmik Network team who are building Semble, a social bookmarking app built on ATProtocol.

Currently you add a link, add it to Collections (used as categories), and optionally add a Note to the link. A Note is plain text and I'm not sure what the length limit is, but it's slightly too short for longer quotes :)

I use notes to perhaps quote something from the article (by putting it in “”), adding a few thoughts about the link, etc. I've also been adding links to Bluesky posts or ATProto accounts to reference author or where I got it from.

My Current Journal System

I've been running a similar system as posts on my own site, where I call them Journals.

Here's the overview listing all Journals:

Created with Obsidian, with full Obsidian style wikilinking as well as Markdown rich text, and an optional link field. It's a special journal type defined in Jekyll, and it's all rendered as HTML of course.

These are roughly microblog sized, but don't actually have a limit. Fedica supports posting via RSS, and this had let me turn these journal posts directly into microblog posts.

The date-time is the permalink, and goes to an individual link page, here's the top one from the screenshot above:

So in this example, there are a couple of links and a blockquote from the article.

I went through all that to show how I think about link blogging today. That I link to store links, as well as then put notes, with basic rich text like quotes and links.

Semble Notes as a link blog

The flow I'd love to see is have Semble be my link blog.

I'd suggest being able to get an RSS feed out of any Collection, so you can have one or more link blogs.

The Note for a card would be the body of each post. I'd like to see the format of Notes be upgraded to be facet-based rich text – supporting links and @-mentions (which are supported on bsky).

Quotes in particular I think could be first class and used often.

Length wise, maybe 1000 character limit, roughly 3-4 Bluesky microblog posts?

Now that the Standard Site Lexicon exists, you could enable any Collection as a link blog. Or perhaps just have all Collections emit the correct settings? I could see this going either way.

But of course, that still leaves step two of sharing your link blog with others, and you're back to microblog sized posts.

I would like to see integration with Bluesky in an automated way. Ideally, part of setting up a Collection as a link blog is a checkmark for "Publish each note to Bluesky".

The Semble Note becomes the body of the post. Truncate it if it's too long. It retains rich text links and bsky mentions. The link preview is a nice Semble card with a customized OpenGraph.