I'm a writer, a pro-democracy lefty social organizer and a power-user of tech generally. Naturally, I was an early adopter of bluesky and as soon as I learned about AT protocol I started following news about it. Then, ATmosphereconf happened over the weekend, I streamed a good bit of it, and have now gone down the rabbit hole completely. This is what reitrement was made for, right?
This morning I discoveried WhiteWind via the YT channel AT Protocol Development and am wondering if it has the potential to build out into something that could one day rival Substack but with all the perks of ATproto! I think it can. Here are my thoughts on using it for the first time:
So far, creating the account, learning the basics and writing this first post have been super easy. Kudos to the developers for making it super slim and user friendly.
Tip #1: don't hide the about link in the footer alone. It's too easy to miss. Design the top of the page with the first-time user in mind, a writer who knows nothing about the tech side.
Tip #2: set the default publish level to public. It wasn't obvious that clicking that button produced a drop down with choices so since the default was "author only" that's how I publihed it. Then I was frustrated that it was set to "author only." I had to go back, figure out how to get to the edit view, then change it to public.
Tip #3: simplify the process for uploading/inserting a photo into an article so that the user does not need to copy/paste the URL. It took me about 5 tries before I was able to successfully insert a simple photo into this article.
Tip #4: make it so that when a link is published to my bsky account, the first image from the WhiteWind post shows in the skeet instead of the WhiteWind profile. If someone is posting regularly from their WW account to their bluesky account, all of them will have the same visual appeal with the title being the only difference. It would be a huge benefit if they had different images.
I'm very excited to use this platform. It allows a Bluesky user an easy way to add long-form content to their Bluesky account. If I was a substack writer (I have a stub, of course, but have never really used it) I would be asking:
- how do I publish this to my subscribers via email
- how do new subsribers sign up if all they want is to get the email copy
- how can this post be distributed via email as part of the same workflow that I am using to create this? (Obviously, that would require building out the WhiteWind platform substantially, but .... yeah, Let's Go!)
Love what's happening here on WhiteWind. Keep up the amazing work. And...
thanks for all the fish...
FS
