Dear readers and Semblers,

Sorry we’re late with the April update, but a lot is blooming this spring for Cosmik and Semble! 🌱

• We’ve been busy refining our program thesis as part of the Renaissance Philanthropy BiTS accelerator - we’ll have more to share next month.

• We gave a talk at the STAMINA working group in the Complex Data Lab at McGill University in Montreal, view the recording here:

  Play Video

• The ATScience talk recordings are up! View them here

• We’re collecting feedback from event participants - if you attended either in-person or via the livestream, please fill out the post-event survey!

• Once we process the feedback we’ll share an event writeup

• Early in April we launched Connections, a new way to organize, curate and discover content on the open social web:

• Annotations, bookmarks, and collections are familiar, but connections are a new affordance so we were not sure how the feature would be received by the community. What we have learned is that there are a lot of curious and crafty sensemakers on Semble: people started creating connections the moment we enabled the feature, even before we announced its existence! Overall the response has been great, and we’re excited that the community appreciates them as much as we do.

• Or as @joebasser wrote: "Sense is being made"

• Connections enable a fun new notification pattern - you get a notification when someone adds a connection to a card in your library, like a dose of microserendipity

• AI Agents are also using connections! Here’s @sensemaker.computer providing citations in support of its Bluesky posts:

  

We’re continuing to notice interesting new knowledge sharing patterns on Semble.

• “who’s keeping track of topic X”

• “Topic Y is missing a curated collection of resources, let’s create one”

• Open tabs turning into shared trail markers that benefit others

We continue to be blown away by the generativity of the atproto community.

• @disnetdev wanted an interface for Semble optimized for saving, so he just built one - SembleIt!

  I wanted a stripped-down Semble. Just my cards, my collections, my connections. No explore, no related surfaces. Nothing pulling at my attention.

  Because Semble is built on atproto, I could just build one. All my cards and collections live on my PDS, not Semble's servers, which means anyone can write another client against the same data.

• He also shared a great blog post about his own “Atmospheric Website” which includes a snazzy https://www.disnetdev.com/reading page backed by Semble.

• Gov shipped rabbithole.land, a browser extension for collaborative digital trail mapping that interoperates with Semble.

• Anuj shipped Disperse, a tool for quickly sharing links to multiple Atmosphere bookmarking/blogging services, including Semble

• Thanks @Tyler.fun for contributing some great fixes and upgrades to the Semble code!

  fix(toast-load): infinite load of adding a card on a collection page by tylersayshi · Pull Request #704 · cosmik-network/semble

  A social knowledge tool for research trails, built on ATProto - fix(toast-load): infinite load of adding a card on a collection page by tylersayshi · Pull Request #704 · cosmik-network/semble

  https://github.com

  

• @uppy-hacker.bsky.social has been sharing some interesting “trending collections” analytics!

What would you like to see next on Semble? We're always keen to hear feedback or suggestions so please be in touch!

Thanks again to all the awesome contributors, and see you in the Atmosphere!

Team Cosmik