It's been a while since the last Skyreader update. To be honest, I kinda got a little distracted by a bunch of other side projects. But! I'm now back and focused on Skyreader and have a bunch of improvements to talk about today.
When I first started working on Skyreader I was motivated to bring back the magic of Google Reader: sharing cool articles with your friends. To that end, Skyreader launched with a share button and a "share" lexicon. This worked in theory but had a few issues that held it back.
First, Skyreader didn't really surface what your friends were sharing very well; following your friends shares involved manually re-following everyone in Skyreader. Second, shares were only really visible inside Skyreader. The share lexicon was open but it still required other reading apps to adopt it to see your shares outside of Skyreader.
But, I recently had a realization. Sharing articles is basically just a linkblog. Why don't we just make a linkblog? We already have standard.site so why bother with a bespoke lexicon?
So now when you share an article in Skyreader it gets published to your very own standard.site linkblog. Your linkblog is a normal standard.site publication, which means you can follow it in any standard.site reader, read it on the web, and it even has an RSS feed for traditional RSS readers. You can see my linkblog here: https://linkblogs.skyreader.app/disnetdev.com/
You can also now add commentary to your shares (another feature I hadn't implemented with the old lexicon), just like a real linkblog.
(This is all part of my secret plan to make everyone a blogger.)
Finding your people
Another critical but until now underdeveloped feature has been discovery; how do you find all the cool stuff your friends are sharing? Previously you could follow atproto accounts but had to manually enter each account you wanted to follow.
Now, the new Discover page shows all the standard.site publications from all the people you already follow on Bluesky.
Since the new Skyreader shares are standard.site publications you can subscribe to them like any other publication. In addition, Skyreader will surface linkblogs from people you already follow in a dedicated section:
Linkblog shares are also styled nicely in the feed, showing who shared them along with their commentary:
Of course, you can still add publications from accounts you don't already follow, but it should be much easier to get started with the content from people you know.
The discussion
While the focus of the recent updates has been improving sharing and the standard.site experience, another experimental feature snuck in: discussions from across the Atmosphere.
Articles now have a discussion button that gives a peek into the conversation happening across the Atmosphere. Currently it shows mentions of the article across the standard.site blogosphere, Bluesky posts, along with Margin and Semble saves.
This is still an experimental feature and won't show every post linking to the article but I'll be improving it over time along with expanding the kinds of sources it pulls from.
Next Up
Let me know what you think of the new sharing approach! Do you like having an automatic standard.site publication for linkblogging? Can you more easily find people and content? What other sources would you like to see in the discussion layer?
Let me know and if you run into any bugs open an issue.