Moving My Blog to The Atmosphere aka AT Proto
Blogging used to be fun. Then it became energy-consuming. AT Proto brings the best part of the past and, hopefully, will renew my blogging.
You may have heard of Bluesky, the Twitter-esque microblogging platform. But you may not have heard of the Atmosphere, the new moniker for AT Proto, the protocol that Bluesky is built on. AT Proto is a federated protocol that places all your content on your own personal data server (PDS), which no platform controls or owns. Think of it as social with no walls. It's such a different way that it takes awhile to wrap one's brain around it.
Way back when I had two blogs, talk talk talk and my jeejeebhoy.ca blog, I used one app on my desktop or one app on my iPad to write to either one. Then walls sprouted around both platforms on which I blogged: WordPress and Blogger. Peachy. No more third-party app. Double the work for me.
Over the years, I tried to streamline my blogging. Instead, I multiplied them like rabbits. Patreon, Psychology Today, Substack. Time to prune! And the Atmosphere aka AT Proto is providing the solution.
Having joined Bluesky, I already have an Atmosphere account. With this account, I chose Offprint for my blogging. I can't migrate Psychology Today, Patreon, or Blogger to it, but I can migrate my Substack blog to it. My jeejeebhoy.ca blog I kept in place and created a new newsletter Compositionally Yours on Offprint, which you're reading now. People will be able to click to it through the menu on my website, subscribe via their Atmosphere account, or subscribe via email.
My Substack Mind Explorer blog became Mind Explorer on Offprint. I created Brain Injury Travails on Offprint to reprint my Psychology Today posts and link to them. From one app, I can write to three blogs. No more having to login with different user names and different passwords. My Atmosphere account with one name, one password lets me blog on Offprint, microblog on Bluesky, subscribe to other newsletters on the Atmosphere through Standard Reader, or surf the social web via Surf Social.
Even more time-saving, Offprint includes email subscriptions. One less platform to login to! Plus comments and replies to my articles will appear where the commenter read my post and also directly at the bottom of the post -- without me having to install special plugins or manage through the backend. Win win, I say.
I'll migrate my existing blog email subscribers so they won't miss a post. New readers can subscribe via their Atmosphere accounts or by email. I'm testing it out first with this post.
I've been Bluesky-posting a little on my journey to moving my blog to the Atmosphere.
It's been fun invigorating working with fellow writers and the developers as we dive in. Let's hope this heralds a resurgence of the blogosphere!
My Psychology Today blog focuses on bringing awareness about and restoring life after brain injury from any cause: concussion to traumatic to viral. You may enjoy this month's featured post.
Anxiety after brain injury comprises different brain states, from direct neurophysiological damage to the social consequences of brain injury.
Click here to read the post!