This post was extracted from the draft of my December newsletter and published on Whitewind, demonstrating how a new array of apps on the ATmosphere - the ecosystem built with ATProto, Bluesky's protocol - could potentially usher in seamless decentralised collective intelligence.
Firstly, a disclaimer: I am not technical enough to really understand internet protocols, so if you do, and I've got something wrong, let me know via Bluesky.
What is WhiteWind, and why do I care?
WhiteWind is basically a platform for posting blogs onto the ATmosphere, with content stored on any ATProto Personal Data Server (PDS). So:
- if you have a Bluesky account you just login and your posts will be stored on the PDS BlueSky gave you, with https://whtwnd.com/{Bluesky handle or DID} for a blog homepage (so mine is https://whtwnd.com/mathewlowry.bsky.social)
- but that content remains yours: if you move to another PDS, you wont have any broken links.
For me, however, there are two more killer features:
- Whitewind is markdown-based, as is Obsidian, the personal knowledge management tool I use for thinking and writing
- seamless comments integration with BlueSky: a comment posted to the blog is shared on the commenter's Bluesky account, and whenever someone shares the post on Bluesky it also appears under the post.
I have a gut sense that this represents the start of a profound longterm shift towards decentralised collective intelligence, as set out almost two years ago in two of my manifesto posts:
- Thinking and writing in a decentralised collective intelligence ecosystem, which looked at the benefits of linking thinking and publishing tools
- Social knowledge graphs for collective intelligence , which looked at what happened when you linked together multiple thinking/publishing tools with social networks.
To explain why, I'll first set out how Whitewind could make my transparent thinking process much more seamless, before extrapolating to wider applications.
What is transparent thinking?
I didn't invent the idea of transparent thinking, but by the time I came across it because Andy Matuschak works with the garage door up, I'd been doing it in a ramshackle way since launching a first Hub on Tumblr in 2013.
"I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette....I suspect [working with the garage door up] creates more invested, interesting followings over the long term" - Andy Matuschak
I first shared this process almost a decade ago in a 9 minute read and updated several times since, but essentially it's about getting more value out of the most relevant, high quality content out there, and then successively transforming it to create something original.
From Stop drowning in your Inbox, October 2016
My thinking evolves in iterative steps from left to right. The leftmost steps are integral to my personal productivity process, and ensure I focus most of my time on the most valuable knowledge resources. Then I:
- Store and Share: annotate those resources onto my Hub (then on Tumblr, now here) as I read them every day;
- Reflect: develop my thinking further via semi-regular newsletters, which collect and analyse several related resources (browse them on my Hub);
- Reflect again: do deep dives to develop them into even more occasional blog posts (Everything I Think on my Hub).
It's transparent because those three steps are public. As a result, readers get:
- in each post: a "state of play" of what I think about a topic, and can in many csses easily dig backwards to see how my thinking evolved thanks to the permanent versions pattern I introduced a couple of years ago for selected content like the AI4Communities post, under more or less constant development
- between each post: irregular newsletter updates highlighting what I'm reading, and how it's influencing my thinking.
- on my Hub: everything I read which influenced me as I wrote and rewrote that post, with my notes.
This content thus comes with what Joan Westenberg called an "origin story", providing needed "visibility into source provenance and credibility signals..." (from my notes on Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse, now, tragically, offline). I have a hunch that as more and more content appears written with AI assistance, publishing your content's origin story may reinforce authenticity.
Of course, no writing process is ever that neat and linear, and what you're reading now is a perfect illustration. As I write this there are 21 resources tagged Bluesky and a couple tagged Whitewind on my Hub. However, this blog post is not derived from them and a few newsletters - it was in fact extracted from a working draft of my December 2024 newsletter, which was getting too long. I actually published this blog post before I sent my newsletter, so that the latter could include the former..
Already, Obsidian+Whitewind made that process easy. This is important because the different tools used in different parts of the pipeline must work together seamlessly.
Where does WhiteWind fit in?
They don't currently work together seamlessly.
This is my ideal workflow, abstracted from my earlier posts.
And this is what I'm doing right now!
I use Pocket as my primary Reading Queue, but when I read something I like, I either write and share my notes publicly via my Public Library (on myhub.ai), or use Obsidian's Web clipper pluginto put my notes in my Private library - an Obsidian vault where I put my ideas and other fleeting notes, mix them together to draft blog posts and newsletters, which I then paste into Mailchimp and Medium.
However, if I want to work on a "permanent version" post and/or collaborate with a friend, I need to move my content into another Obsidian vault, shared with the friend either via Obsidian directly or via GitHub and massive.wiki (see Why I'm massively into massive.wiki (and why you should be too)).
Now there are proponents of Personal Knowledge Management claiming that new ideas emerge from a tangled hairball of notes by themselves, like a fern rising gracefully from rotting soil. Maybe it works for them, but personally I think it's bullshit to promise that PKM "can mechanistically deliver—or substitute for—the brute, linear willfulness that defines all non-trivial writing" (from my notes on "Personal Knowledge Management is Bullshit", now also tragically offline). Writing is, in other words, hard enough, which is why I use a powerful thinking tool like Obsidian, and every single complication consumes mental energy that I could have used to think and write.
So that's why WhiteWind got my attention. Because Whitewind is markdown-based, the content I create in Obsidian is ready for publication. All I had to do was right-click in Obsidian to extract the middle section of my newsletter draft into a new file, edit it a little, paste it into Whitewind, add the images, and it was live.
Whitewind's desktop editing environment, left, will be familiar to anyone who's ever used hackmd.io, while the mobile interface seems fully featured.
That may not sound completely seamless, but that's because these tools don't talk to each other yet. But they could.
Imagining seamlessness
I've always wanted seamless integration between reading queue, thinking tool and a publish button:
why not make your public website a seamless extension of your private Tool4Thought? ... manage everything you have — your bookmarks, ideas, notes and drafts — in one place. Set any content to ‘Public’ and it appears on your public site - Thinking and writing in a decentralised collective intelligence ecosystem, January 2023
What WhiteWind showed me is that my workflow could one day look like this:
Everything goes into my private Obsidian library, where I think and write as before. However, by changing an Obsidian note's properties ("Hub this", "Blog this", etc.) it is exported to and published via the appropriate ATmosphere app, with social conversations on all of this content mediated via Bluesky.
Implications
Of course, it's early days - the above workflow requires work in both ATmosphere and Obsidian. However there's already an export to Bluesky plugin for Obsidian, so I doubt this is technically insuperable.
But I'm less excited for my specific workflow, above, than I am for the wider potential. Because if this is feasible, there's now no reason to not create this:
This is only a light update of the picture from Social knowledge graphs for collective intelligence (January 2023). As before, it shows individuals' content pipelines linked together via social networks and collaboration environments. In this version, however, the public sites are ATproto apps like Whitewind, while I swapped out the Solid Hub for an ATProto PDS.
The PDS, moreover, no longer stores my private library, as all content on ATProto is public (if you know where to look). However, I see separating thinking and publishing tools as a feature, not a bug: an ecosystem of thinking tools and publishing apps which compete amongst themselves while talking to each other will be more innovative than one dominated by integrated apps.
The above picture, however, still focuses on individuals reading, thinking, sharing and collaborating via the ATmosphere. I believe more is possible, so as I finish this post I'm hoping the next ones will look into:
- integrating ATmosphere-supported conversations into online communities
- what happens when you add a new layer of ATProto #AI4communities apps into the picture which "remix" this content, further adding value.
Man, this is going to be fun.
Comment, follow and get in touch:
- browse my newsletter, subscribe and drop me a line via my Hub, and follow me on Bluesky
- browse everything I #LikeThinkDo tagged BlueSky
- I'm exploring AI4communities, so here's everything I wrote about it, and everything I have about it (or grab their RSS feeds)
