When I first started working on Skyreader earlier this year, I thought I was just making a fun little RSS reader on atproto. I always loved how RSS readers let users, not platforms, take ownership of their attention and wanted to try my hand at one. As I've continued to iterate and as the Atmosphere has grown, I've realized Skyreader can become something much more interesting.
Up and coming Atmospheric ecosystems (cloudscapes?) are starting to form. The Bluesky discussion layer, standard.site publications, the Margin annotation layer, and the Semble knowledge graph all point us towards new ways of sharing and making sense of our world where ideas and voices travel beyond the silos they were authored in.
This is exciting, but as ways of creating proliferate, it's becoming harder for each of us to find all of the neat stuff being made.
So we need new reading apps that help us find and follow the voices we care about across the open network. But there's a danger here. When publishing is decentralized, power shifts to whoever controls discovery and attention.
This has happened before: RSS was as open as it gets, but attention consolidated into one free app: Google Reader. When Google lost interest, the ecosystem cratered and attention shifted to platforms that controlled everything.
The Atmosphere is making publishing open again. But open publishing on its own isn't enough. If discovery collapses into one or two apps, we end up right back with a reading surface built for a platform's interests (time on site, ad impressions, fascism) rather than our interests.
We need a healthy ecosystem of open reading apps. Where your subscriptions, highlights, and reading history are yours, portable to any app that speaks the protocol. When leaving is cheap, no app can hold your attention hostage. This is all possible because atproto has created the conditions for readers to own the means of attention.
So, this is my vision for a true modern reading app. Your attention is precious so your reading app should be the place where your attention can live. It should pull together the voices and ideas that you care about from anywhere and help you make sense of everything, and it should be locked open so your attention can freely move when another home fits your needs better.
And Skyreader is starting to become this.
Skyreader launched only supporting RSS, then added standard.site support, with more subscription sources to come soon so you can follow the voices you care about from anywhere.
I've also been adding features to help you make sense of everything:
The discussion section surfaces how people are responding to the article you are reading across Bluesky, standard.site, and Semble.
Margin highlights and notes from across the network can now augment the articles you are reading.
Review mode resurfaces what you've read so it actually sticks.
And I'm just getting started with what Skyreader can be. Coming soon is integration with atproto spaces, which will allow me to truly deliver on the locked open promise by moving your non-public data (private subscriptions, reading history, private highlights and notes, etc.) onto the protocol so you can move your reading home at any point.
The platform era's deal was "free" reading paid for with your attention. I'd rather keep the deal simple: if this vision of a reader that respects your attention resonates, you can now directly support Skyreader's operation and ongoing development via a paid subscription plan. Skyreader will continue to have a free tier with limits on number of active feeds and article saves to keep my costs manageable. A paid plan raises your limits but more importantly your direct support keeps Skyreader answering to the readers instead of anyone who'd like to buy your attention out from under you.
If you haven't already (or it's been a while) try out Skyreader (or one of the other modern reading apps built on the atmosphere!) and tell me what you think a modern reading app worth your attention should look like.