Trying out WhiteWind
So, I stumbled uppon whitewind because I saw primal.net works over nostr.
I wanted a similar experience, something like Medium.com - you know, that premium feeling - but without paywalls or required logins. I have my issues with AT-Proto, but I think that it's model is closer to something that would succeed than Nostr. One of the things I liked about primal, is their "Reads" section - I visited a that Jack Dorsey shared on Twitter about BitChat. The post had a very friendly UI. I was surprised to discover primal was a nostr client and not another centralized blogging platform.
I thought it would be a good idea to have a blogging platform over at-proto, so I started researching the market - and found WhiteWind. I looked at the Lexicon and the UI and thought it was good but could be improved. I also impulsively purchased a domain (avg.blue) for my own at-proto based blog.
WhiteWind opinions
This service is very cool. I like many things about having the ability to write a blogpost on at-proto, I was also pleased to read somewhere that it's maintained by someone who did this as a side project (Kudos!).
There are things that I would like to improve though.
1. Attachments
This is an issue with at-proto.
When adding images, the at-proto record contains references to the blobs. But the markdown itself contains a link to the PDS that hosts the image. This is problematic because if a user migrates to another PDS, all blob links are no longer valid. Images should be referenced by their CID & owner's DID instead. The issue: there's no current AT-URI format for blobs.
2. Link to AT-Proto Posts
Similar to attachments. Links to posts or other whtwnd articles shouldn't reference whitewind.com or bsky.social domains - instead they should use AT-URIs which do have a format.
3. Front Matter
Instead of using embeded metadata in the lexicon properties, perhaps they should be stored as front matter in the beginning of the document. This would allow setting a title, description, and any other metadata you can think of without breaking the lexicon. I would think it's useful to use "tags" or "series" metadata properties.
Another thing, it can be used to specify a URL slug - so we can view articles with a nice URL instead of the record's rkey.
