A community app lexicon

Lexicon Community
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Visualization layer: a 2D map for the app directory

I’ve been following this thread with interest. The discussion so far focuses on the data layer — what fields the lexicon needs. I’d like to propose the complementary piece: how we present it.

The problem Boris named is real. 21 spreadsheets and awesome lists. Lists are good for lookup but bad for overview. You can find what you already know exists, but you can’t see what’s missing.

A 2D map solves this. Apps are placed on two axes:

  • Y-axis: what users do (Communicate, Discover, Create, Analyze, Moderate, Manage)

  • X-axis: audience scope (Everyone → Community → Creators → Power Users)

  • Maturity is expressed as color (Established / Growing / Emerging / Experimental)

Populated cells show density. Empty cells show gaps — areas where no one has built anything yet. This is the information no list can give you.

The map consumes whatever data the app lexicon produces. It doesn’t compete with atproto.garden or BlueskyDirectory — it’s a different view of the same data. Directory as data layer, map as visualization layer.

I’m building a working prototype. Will share a URL shortly.

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Here’s the working prototype:

https://moja.tngl.io/atproto-ecosystem-map

Grid view shows density and gaps at a glance. Click any cell to drill down. Empty cells with “?” mark opportunities. Color encodes maturity. Scatter view plots the same data spatially.

The product data is placeholder — the real value is the UI pattern itself. Plug in whatever the app lexicon produces and the map updates.

Source: https://tangled.org/moja.blue/atproto-ecosystem-map

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Sorry, just getting caught up on the discussion! Somehow, I had the notification level set to Normal instead of Watching, so I wasn’t getting notified. :man_facepalming:

The @pixeline.be draft is a great start. :raising_hands: I’ll discuss with the crew here (Bluesky Directory) and post our thoughts based on our experience operating the directory and internal discussions we’ve had about building its successor. Probably will take a couple of days.

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Sorry, this week got away from me! I will post more thoughts next week.

As a preface–I’m a product person. While I’m “very technical,” as my mother (RIP) used to say, I’m not an engineer, so I won’t wade into the technical design of lexicons here. My contributions here will be from the PoV of 1) product manager of an ATmosphere app directory, and 2) end user of ATmosphere apps and app directories.

Luckily, there are incredibly smart engineers at Limeleaf. I came back from ATMosphereConf all revved up to start building the ATProto-focused successor to Bluesky Directory that we’d been discussing internally. To that end, Blain drafted three ideas for lexicons at ATmosphere Directory lexicons.

We’re not proposing these as replacements for/additions to the current draft. We just wanted to show the group how we were thinking about approaching it, not as app developers, but as developers of an app directory.

Anyway, more next week. We’re excited that this work is underway! Have a great weekend!

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Bringing this back to focus again.

Many of the ideas around “this would be helpful for this UI” I think should fall into the leave it for specific app add-ons — or perhaps an optional catch-all field — for now.

There’s a mix of different things people want or think would be useful, but I think there’s also clearly overlap. We should focus on establishing those overlaps as community lexicon. Then we can always come back to adding more later. But IMO we shouldn’t delay establishing a base because of differences in how people might want to represent more categorical or organizational fields.

If someone wants to formalize the WG that’d be great, I’m not sure I’m ready to step into that role (yet, could change, life is weird, etc).

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I completely missed this link! I see you’ve got the WG template started. If you post it as a new thread in Discussion, per Boris:

I’d say make a new thread posting the template in. I can turn on wiki mode so y’all can group edit.

We can make a dedicated category here if you want, eg like :spiral_calendar:Lexicon Community > Community Lexicon Calendar

then with wiki mode we can do editing + any discussion on the template there to move us along.

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Done! Community App Lexicon WG

@bmann.ca can you turn on the wiki mode ?

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