Our tiny manual! Leaflet's simple, so we made a version that takes less than a minute to read :)

Quick to make

Go to leaflet.pub to make a new doc — no account needed

If you do sign in, we'll save your docs to your home

Easy to share

Copy a view only link, or an edit link to invite collaborators

Block editor

Add rich text, images, subpages, links, embeds & more

Use headers, highlights, even foldable lists / checklists

One page, or many

Add subpages as needed, and open them side by side

Pages can be linear documents or visual canvases

Custom themes

Edit your color theme to make each Leaflet unique

Set for the whole doc…and per-page!

Collaborative by default

More detail, for those who like to know about all the pieces & how they fit together…

Leaflet's core design principles

We want Leaflet to be:

fast: highly performant, with ~instant page loads

delightful: a great text editing experience that nails the basics, with some fun touches layered on

expressive: low floor (simple!) + high ceiling (powerful!), and flexible for a range of creative use cases

personal: super customizable, moldable to your needs

The Basics

Leaflet is a block-based document editor — you can create docs with no account needed, and share them just as easily

When you do make an account, we'll sync all your docs seamlessly across any device

Docs start with a single page; you can add as many pages as you like, including canvas pages

Leaflet is collaborative at its core; anyone with the edit link can add or change things

Getting Around

Block menu: hit "+" from an empty block or type "/" for the full block menu

Editor toolbar: format text and find other block options from the bottom toolbar while editing

Leaflet is adding social publishing features — a way to make publications like blogs / newsletters, built on Bluesky!

Publications on Leaflet are built on Bluesky, to publish your data openly and (soon) power things like comments, recommendations, and memberships across Bluesky's open social graph.

We've just launched the initial version, where you can make publications and publish posts. Stay tuned for more!

How to get started:

Connect your Bluesky account from leaflet.pub/home

Make a new publication (you can make as many as you like)

Make post drafts, and when you're ready, hit publish!

Your publication data lives on your PDS — same place your Bluesky data lives, open and under your control.

Some caveats for now:

deleting posts / publications — can't do this via Leaflet UI, but possible with a PDS browser tool like PDSls

adding existing Leaflets — at the moment not possible (have to make a new post draft from a publication), but we'd like to add

Things we're working on soon:

custom domains for publications

more theming options and ways to make pubs more fun

subscribing to publications via email

We'd love to hear more about how you'd like to use Leaflet! Directions we'd like to explore more include…

Expressive docs — new block types like audio, file uploads, or tables; options for things like fonts, export, and block actions

Social docs — expressive ways to share and respond to a doc, from stickers to comments (in particular with publications)

Programmable docs — ways of interacting with docs programmatically; or generating custom components within a doc

Specific to our WIP new publishing features, built on Bluesky, there's a lot we'd like to add:

Subscription options, so readers can get updates via email or perhaps directly via Bluesky

Social features, like comments and discovery

Monetization, e.g. Substack or Patreon style memberships

Leaflet is a project from Hyperlink Academy, a school–software studio–research lab making tools for learning and collaboration.

We're a team of three based in Brooklyn, NY and we've been working on Leaflet since mid-2024.

We're exploring some fun directions for Leaflet; see the previous page for more detail!

For our NYC friends, we sometimes host writing sessions, bringing people together to draft & publish particular types of docs…like manifestos, recipes, or poems.

We share updates every couple weeks to our email list. You can also view our GitHub repo for WIP issues & known bugs.

If you have any questions or feedback please reach out :)

Leaflet is a new product and at this stage there's inherent uncertainty about it's long-term future. That said, we place a lot of importance on stability and peace of mind for the documents we create.

While we can't guarantee zero bugs or infinite lifespan, we can make the following commitment to you. If the hosted Leaflet app (leaflet.pub) shuts down in the future, we'll provide:

at least six months notice before switching to read-only, and at least twelve months of hosting read-only documents

a way to download Leaflets (JSON file + attachments) that can be imported into a self-hosted version of the app (source here)

There's more we'd like to do, like additional export options, but this feels like a reasonable baseline! Please reach out with any questions.

Brendan, Jared, & Celine

~

update log