Cosmik Lab Notes 002: Semble Updates - Community Tinkering, Basic API, and New Discovery Features

Happy Friday everyone,

First of all - wow! Just two weeks have passed since we released the open alpha version of Semble , and it’s been very exciting to see the engagement!

Feeling the ACI (Augmented Collective Intelligence)

We’re already seeing a steady stream of interesting curations, and we’re starting to experience the magic of more intentional online attention sharing.

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Community hacking on Semble

One development we are particularly excited by is that people are already hacking on Semble to add various extensions and integrations! So much is going on that we created a Semble collection to track all those projects:

Semble Community Tinkering (by Cosmik Network) - Semble

Community projects extending Semble in interesting ways

We also recently merged our very first community PR ! Shout out to @ vielle.dev for making that happen!

PDS as Universal API

We recently shipped a firehose subscriber which listens for repository commits on network.cosmik.* records and automatically reflects these changes in Semble’s AppView:

What this means is that you can use your own PDS as a defacto Semble API (until we ship a more comprehensive AppView API). This is one of the really cools things about building on ATProto.

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Or as Dan Abramov puts it in Open Social , "The protocol is the API.” Exciting stuff!

This is especially exciting for us because a few people have already asked us if it’s possible to support integrations with other bookmarking tools, for example to import bookmarks from apps like Raindrop . So to all the SenseMakers out there who like hacking on their knowledge tools — this is our first step in making that easier.

We’ve also published a lightweight PDS client purpose-built for working with Semble records in your repository . This makes it even easier to work with your PDS as a Semble API. Read more about how to get started with that in our docs:

Getting Started with the Semble PDS Client | Semble Docs | Cosmik

We'll be shipping a more comprehensive API in the future. Meanwhile, this is a simple and lightweight PDS client for creating, updating, and deleting Semble records directly on your PDS. Please share any feedback about bugs or ways to improve it (or feel free to make a PR directly to the package).

Similar Cards

The Semble page got a new tab — “Similar Cards”!

The “Similar Cards” tab surfaces semantically similar URLs from across the network, adding a whole new discovery layer within the app.

Bluesky post view

Finally, we also have a special new view for Bluesky posts (identifiable by the 🦋) that better preserves the original structure and content:

Happy assembling!

We’re continuously blown away by the creativity of the broader ATProto community and are grateful for all those that have taken an early interest in Semble. We can’t wait to see what we create together 🫶

— Cosmik Team