Lab Notes #008: Semble Connections

Over the last few months, we’ve been designing and building an exciting new kind of affordance in Semble: Connections.

Since we quietly released connections prior to ATmosphereConf 2026, some of you have already been using them without any explanation (to our delight!). Whether you're discovering them for the first time or have been using them already, here's a deeper look at what connections are and why we think they're an important piece of the open social web.

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(btw @taurean.bryant.land you are not "late" to the idea at all...)

What and Why?

Before all that, let’s take a step back and remind ourselves what Semble is at it’s core: Semble is all about making sense of content and making these acts of knowledge curation, organizing and synthesis visible to our social networks. The main way to do this currently is by adding cards to collections, the bread and butter of Semble.

All cards in a collection have a clear relationship to the collection itself. They also have an implicit relationship with every other card in the collection by nature of being in the collection together.

However, there are times when two cards have a direct and useful relationship between them. Connections let users make such relationships explicit without the need for a collection.

In doing so, Connections provide an affordance for a new kind of knowledge curation not yet seen in social networks.

Just as Collections provide a lens for curators to perceive and critically evaluate content through, so too do Connections.

Collections and Connections both shape how we perceive and evaluate content, but in different ways. Collections frame content around a broader theme, while Connections frame it around its direct relationship to other specific pieces of content.

Many of us constantly notice interesting associations between content: ongoing discussions on topics we follow, related reference material, books exploring a similar theme. But we rarely have good tools to make those associations explicit and share them. Semble changes that.

Here are some examples of the kind of curation they support:

connecting a github repo or a dataset to the associated published research paper

connecting a viral blog to a helpful Bluesky thread critiquing the main points made in it

connecting a related book to a movie you just watched

Furthermore, connections can also be typed, allowing for more expressive discourse and curation to emerge.

How to Create Connections

There are 3 main ways to create a connection in Semble. In all cases, you can quickly search and select any link already saved to Semble.

The first way is via the generic “create” button and drawer. Here you’ll need to provide/find both URLs to include in the connection.

The second way is directly on the card item view seen throughout the app. Click the connect button and paste or search for the other URL to connect the card to.

The third way is from the Semble page, by clicking on the “connect” button, similar to the above method.

How to Edit Connections

You can edit your connections directly from the feed or on your profile page. You can change the label, the direction of the connection, and the note.

How to Discover Connections

Connections will show up in several places throughout Semble.

Created connections will show up in the feed, and you can filter the feed by activity type.

We also show the number of connections on the card item view, just like the number of libraries the card has been saved to.

There is a new “Connections” tab on the Semble page which lists all connections with the Semble page URL (whether connecting to or from the URL).

Lastly, connections will show up in your notifications if someone makes a connection to a URL you’ve saved to your library.

Happy Connecting

We’re really excited about the possibilities enabled by Semble Connections. Whether it’s folks experimenting with AI agents curating knowledge for them, ways for communities and organizers to build up context around important long-form documents, or for simply recommending related resources to those who’ve already saved certain links in their library.

We hope that connections offer a new kind of lens through which we can perceive our information environments around us.

To building healthier knowledge commons one connection at a time.

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