Integrations as Plugins

Some of us on the Cosmik Network team got to meet up with some of the Leaflet team on an exploratory call last week. Some of what we talked about were shared needs as builders of atproto apps as well as possible integrations between them.

One tension that came up was about how to maintain a unified app experience while enabling new forms of interoperability -- one of the core motivations for building on #atproto in the first place. If an app tries to support too many other app and lexicon integrations it ceases to have its own unique product experience and clear use-cases. It's a slippery slope to building an "everything" app.

Our current approach to this is to think of integrations as "plugins". Plugins are a familiar concept to many of us and can be a great way to think of integrations as enhancements to a core product. A great example of this is the rich ecosystem of plugins for Obsidian , both core and community plugins. These plugins don't change what Obsidian is all about but can greatly enhance and personalize the overall experience.

Semble is all about collecting, curating, and sharing " micro-knowledge " -- insights, recommendations, reviews, hot-takes and so on -- meant to help us collectively make sense of content on the internet (and ideally the world around us). In it's current form, this is all about collecting and organizing links. Which means any integrations we support from across the ATmosphere should not distract or take away from this core set of functionality.

Leaflet is a great source of links. Any given publication could be full of interesting links that readers want to share and collect easily. How can we make these links more discoverable and interactive in Semble? Here are a few ideas:

Above you can see an "integrations" section in the left panel. This is where different ATmosphere integrations can be added. When enabled, you get a few options (specific to the integration) about how to handle links. The examples here outline two options: automatically collecting your own leaflet publications into a special semble collections as well as automatically adding any link in your publications to another semble collection.

That's all about sharing and organizing links from your leaflet publications, what about the other way? Here's one idea:

Here, we can make it easier for users to see all links in a leaflet pub and save them directly in semble.

These kinds of patterns could easily extend to bluesky posts/threads or other lexicons across the network.

What do you think? Would you like to be able collect links like this? Have any other ideas? Let us know!