Tim Disney
SembleIt: Semble Without the Distractions
Semble is, I think, one of the best apps on the Atmosphere right now. It's also two apps wearing a trench coat. One is for thinking through your own stuff: cards, collections, connections between them. The other is for finding what other people are thinking: an explore page, open collections to browse, related cards surfacing alongside yours. It's unusually good at both, and that's a problem.
This tension between modes is something I've been thinking about a lot while building Flint. Both modes matter, but I'm rarely in both at once. When I sit down to do focused organization work (sorting things, cleaning up connections, thinking through a concept), the discovery features become accidental friction. The explore tab is right there. Related items keep surfacing. My attention wanders.
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.
So I did: sembleit.dev.
It's a minimal client scoped to personal data management. Cards, collections, connections, and a following view for browsing other users' public stuff when you actually want to. That's it. Same network.cosmik.* lexicons as Semble, same data, different surface.
Since all I want is an interface into my own data, there's no backend at all. SembleIt is a static SvelteKit SPA that talks directly to your PDS over OAuth. Sign in with your Atmosphere account and you're in. No server, no database. Which also means it's basically free to host: static files on a CDN.
It's local-first too. Everything lives in IndexedDB on your device, and writes queue up and sync back to your PDS. You can browse and manage your cards offline; the PDS is just the remote source of truth.
This is what Semble looks like when you just want to think. Go try it at sembleit.dev.