Tumblr was special. The reblog chain, the themes, the weird community energy: nothing else has quite replicated it. Pollen is my attempt to bring that back, built on the atmosphere where your posts actually belong to you. It’s the project that made me fall in love with building on ATProto.
What it does
Pollen is a microblogging platform built around reblog chains. Content spreads like dandelion seeds: you reblog with commentary and follow each conversation back to its original post. Your posts live on your PDS, not on my servers, so the data remains yours if Pollen disappears.
Post types
Pollen supports more than 14 post formats, each with its own ATProto lexicon:
- Text, image, GIF, video, and audio, with multi-image layouts (grid, masonry, carousel, featured) and rich text with bold, italic, mentions, and hashtags.
- Quote posts, with source attribution.
- Chat posts, which format a conversation between named speakers.
- Polls, with expiration.
- Todo lists, which are shareable checklists.
- AMA, with a private question inbox. Questions stay private until you publish answers as real posts, and those can auto-cross-post to Bluesky.
- Bluesky and Atmosphere embeds, rendered natively from any ATProto app instead of dropped into an iframe.
Custom theming
Full CSS customization via your profile, with a CodeMirror editor and live preview. Pick accent colors, choose layouts (single column or masonry), or go deeper with raw CSS. There are also built-in “Spaces”, which are whole aesthetic systems that reskin the platform. Garden is soft watercolors and glassmorphic cards. Ink is minimal literary magazine. Dusk is dark and atmospheric with twinkling stars.
The meadow
The landing page is an interactive Three.js scene with floating dandelion seeds. Hover over them and they reveal recent posts. Real-time Jetstream events trigger new seed animations. It’s code-split so returning users don’t pay the bundle cost.
The infrastructure
Pollen runs its own PDS at pds.pollen.place. Users can register *.pollen.place handles or migrate from other PDSes. It uses Bun, Elysia, and Turso on Fly.io. The PDS remains authoritative for user data, while Turso acts as a read cache synced through Jetstream.
The frontend is all Lit web components, 20+ custom elements with no build step. The compose experience uses a “Dreamscape” flow where post-type orbs burst from a FAB and float across the screen before animating into the editor.
Pollen has become my biggest atmosphere project and the most fun to tinker with. There’s always another post type to add, another theme to build, another weird interaction to try. It’s the project I keep coming back to.