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 full microblogging platform with reblog chains at its heart. Content spreads like dandelion seeds — you reblog with commentary, building conversation chains back to the original source. It’s the social model that made Tumblr work, built on infrastructure that can’t be sold out from under you. Your posts live on your PDS, not on my servers. If Pollen disappears tomorrow, your data doesn’t.
Post Types
This is where it gets fun. Pollen supports 14+ post formats, each with its own ATProto lexicon:
- Text, image, GIF, video, audio — the basics, done right. Multi-image layouts (grid, masonry, carousel, featured). Rich text with bold, italic, mentions, hashtags.
- Quote posts — borrowed wisdom with source attribution
- Chat posts — format conversations with speakers
- Polls — interactive voting with expiration
- Todo lists — shareable checklists
- AMA — ask-me-anything with a private question inbox. Questions stay private until you publish answers as real posts, with auto-cross-posting to Bluesky.
- Bluesky and Atmosphere embeds — native rendering of posts from across the ecosystem. Not iframes — real, rich content from any ATProto app.
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” — aesthetic systems that completely 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 — it’s not just a client, it’s infrastructure. Users can register *.pollen.place handles or migrate from other PDSes. The architecture is edge-first: Bun + Elysia + Turso on Fly.io. The PDS is authoritative for all user data, with Turso as a read cache synced via Jetstream.
The frontend is all Lit web components — 20+ custom elements, no build step needed. 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.