About Pckt Notes & Writers Block - Brookie’s Blog

I'm feeling bad at writing lately.

I think that's okay sometimes, not everything has to be perfect... And it's not really perfection that I'm seeking, but it can be very inconvenient when I'm trying to write something that is easily understood.

It's like, I don't quite know where to start, or how to explain what I'm trying to.

I know this is typical for writers... (if i can call myself a writer lol, i'm not really.) Writer's block... But damn, I've got things that I need to explain.

I'm writing an explainer piece for the new "notes" feature in pckt. It's in a little beta testing period right now, but it seems like people are enjoying it so far and it's working well !

Notes can be used to share short thoughts, but they can also be used to comment on blog posts, or participate in discussions within the community here.

It's one of those things that is a little bit tough to explain, but once you use it, just kinda makes sense—or at least I think it does...

There's still a few areas I'd like to polish up before releasing to everyone, but here's the gist of what pckt notes can be:

Comments
Notes can be used to leave a comment on someone's blog post.
Micro-blog posts
You can share a quick thought and choose if it gets shared with just the community, or it gets shared on your blog as well.
Quote posts
You can quote note someone's blog, reply, note, to share your thoughts about it and help spread it with the rest of the community.
Replies
You can write a note to reply to a another note.
Re-blogs
A note can be used to re-blog a post you enjoyed to the community feed.

pckt notes are versatile! They can be voiced by you, or your blogs, and they are intended to make it easier to blog when you might not have a lot to say. They also hopefully will help surface blog posts that people enjoyed reading.

You can follow pckt bloggers to see all of their notes in your following feed. And new profile pages let you also see the blogs they write.

Blogs can be subscribed to separately.

When I came up with the idea for notes, I really wanted to call them minis. Like, they are a mini blog post. But it just was less understandable that way. "Leave a note" sounds much better than "Leave a mini" when you're commenting on a blog.

But, the lexicon stays as a reference to my original idea. Notes are referred to as blog.pckt.mini.post following the same kind of naming convention as a Bluesky post. Since, a ~~mini~~ note practically is a Bluesky post that is off network. There's also blog.pckt.mini.repost for re-blogs, keeping things similar here as well.

It's been really fun so far, posting notes and interacting with notes posted by the few people testing it out :) Notes are also really shareable, they have a nice open graph image when a link is shared, and they can be shared on Bluesky directly from pckt with just a few clicks.

If you want to try it out, hit me up. It'll also be generally available soon.

Anyways... Damn, why wasn't this a post for pckt's blog 🙃