The DNA of microblogging traces back to activist tech projects — IndyMedia, built for the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, and TxtMob, built for coordinating protesters at the 2004 party conventions. Both aimed to bypass the information bottle-neck of the mainstream media to let distributed actors share information. These projects directly inspired Twitter, but a few decades later, the form has been captured. The energy of sharing status updates stayed, but the radical potential has been chewed up and spit out by corporate forces and advertisers. Critiques of doomscrolling, the attention economy, and addiction mechanics on major social media networks are well trodden. Moreso, they inform political tactics: after Trump took office in 2025, Steve Bannon explicitly used a strategy of information overload to try to stun the critics of the administration into submission. Hence the hundreds of executive orders signed on the first day of his office. And every day when I wake up, roll over, and check blacksky.community, the strategy continues to work.
The limitations aren't inherent to Bluesky. The design decisions are an artifact of the strategic decision made to copy the Twitter format to siphon off users following Elon’s acquisition. To me, the limitations of the microblogging content seem most pronounced for those who use Bluesky and Blacksky for organizing, activism, and mutual aid. Organizing requires accumulation of context, of resources, and of shared understanding that builds over time. Think about what an ICE rapid-response resource looks like right now. Someone posts information. Other people quote-post it. Someone makes a Google Doc. The link gets shared. New information comes in and either someone updates the doc, or it goes stale. The feed and the resource exist in parallel and slowly drift apart.
The current feed offers the ability broadcast and signal information through 300 character posts, but no inbuilt mechanism for accumulating ideas and context into a durable basis for action. Each post in the feed lives in isolation from the one before and after it, and long threads are a poor workaround for attaching context. A post may disappear in the timeline but if the information in it remains relevant, resurfacing it requires pinning it to your profile or continuous reposting. Within a global town square, this dynamic only amplifies.
Precedent
What I’m identifying is not novel. Other platforms have tried to address it to varying degrees, and failed for reasons not applicable to us. In 2015, Facebook unveiled Notes, long-form content that lived in the app, only to then shut it down because it reduced time looking at ads. X launched Articles for long-form writing, but after scaring away advertisers and tanking their business model, locked it behind a paywall to drive subscription revenue.
The platform that has gotten this the most right is Substack – the re-stack feature allows a reader to take a quote they like from an article and put it directly into the Notes feed. The workflow is quick (select -> share -> done) and the reader never leaves Substack because the quote links directly back to the long form content. The energy of short-form content on the Notes feed streams directly into longer form content. Leaflet has built a version of this, letting users highlight posts and share them to Bluesky. How much further can we take this?
What I want to explore
The open question for me is how durable content relates to the feed experience — how it lives alongside the existing feed rather than outside it. Blacksky is in the unusual position of having a client that many people already use, which means I can explore these questions without asking anyone to switch tools or go somewhere new. The community and the energy already exist.
Starting in March I'll be taking part in Collective Action School, a program to connect people in tech to a long lineage of organizing thought and action. As part of my final project, I want to explore what it looks like for longer form content to live alongside the feed, specific to the needs of organizers – people who, as Mosh recently wrote, aren't just individual users but the high-leverage decision makers who make communities actually function.
There's already incredible energy in the ecosystem around creating alternatives to pure microblogging. Margin and Semble provide tools for curation and sense-making. Roomy is building a group messaging app that lets chats turn into threads that turn into longer writing, which feels close to what I'm circling here. Leaflet, Pckt, and Offsite provide tools for blogging and publishing on atproto, and have arrived at the standard.site shared lexicons. This means that different writing tools can speak the same language, so the writing doesn't have to stay limited to a separate app: it can show up natively in whatever client you're already using.
All of which means the building blocks exist. What I want to figure out is how they come together inside the feed itself.
What I have in mind right now starts from this simple observation: information could flow in two directions.
From document to feed: A passage from a living document (whether a resource guide, a developing analysis, or a collective argument) can be shared into the feed, where it functions as both a standalone insight and an entry point into the larger piece. This mechanic is proven. Substack validated it; Leaflet has built a version of it on atproto. Beyond discovery, this gives people scrolling the feed a way to move from reactive consumption into sustained engagement with a larger idea. The contribution of this project would just involve a native integration of these documents into the same client.
From feed to document: This is the direction that feels more novel: the idea is that posts can be associated with an existing piece of writing. For example, if I posted this Leaflet and a month later, a post discussed a related need, a similar project, or a desired feature, somebody could "plant" (or associate) that post into this document.
That gesture feels different to me than adding the post to Are.na or Semble. A collection is flat, and the blocks are collected because they fit under the same umbrella. On the other hand, a piece of writing already has structure, whether it's making an argument, enumerating a list, or telling a story. Planting a post into a piece of writing allows the editors of the document to later easily synthesize the new information.
Think back to the ICE rapid-response guide. Someone posts about a new related legal ruling. Somebody else posts about a development in ICE's surveillance techniques. Another post discusses new community resources for targets of deportations. Right now those posts float through the feed and maybe the person who wrote the guide sees them, maybe not. With this mechanic, a community member could plant those posts directly into the guide. The maintainer comes back a week later and sees incoming information already addressed to the document. The synthesis still has to happen — but the scaffold is there. And the updated guide can then be posted back into the feed.
There are bigger implications here that I want to explore but don't have answers to yet. If the entire community can associate posts with a document, you have something like a distributed editorial process, a collective curation of what's relevant to a shared resource. That raises questions about permissions and group ownership. Separately, if documents themselves can be subscribed to — if you could follow a living resource and get notified as it evolves, as new posts are associated with it — that opens up entirely new possibilities for what feeds can look like. That raises questions both about how following works and how updates would get pushed. These are different design problems, and I want to think through both with developers and organizers.
For organizers and activists using Bluesky:
Do the dynamics of the feed actively hinder your efforts to create resources that reach people consistently and grow over time?
How much of your time goes to re-explaining context you've already laid out?
Where do your persistent resources live now — Google Docs, link aggregators, pinned posts — and how do people find them?
Would the ability to associate incoming posts with a living resource change how you maintain and share it?
How do you keep track of the current state of an evolving situation? Do you do this with other people?
From developers building tools in this space:
Is native client integration something you've explored, or would it be valuable?
What would the best path for interoperability between an integration and native tools look like?
What would document level subscriptions require at the protocol level?
I'll be exploring these ideas as part of my Collective Action School project over the coming months, and I'd rather build with people than alone. If any of these questions resonate (or you think I'm missing something obvious) I'd love to have a conversation.