What branchline is for
Stories grow
in branches.
It’s a place to grow stories together, one bloom at a time.
The idea
A story on branchline starts as a seed — a short opening bud, hand-picked, with nothing after it. From that seed, the story grows. Anyone can read a path of buds down from the seed, and any logged-in reader can extend the latest bloom on that path by writing the next bud themselves. When two writers extend the same bloom, the story branches, and both versions live on.
Each bud is at most 500 words. That cap is the whole game: small enough to write in one sitting, small enough to read on impulse, small enough that a stranger’s contribution doesn’t feel like a hijack. A story isn’t a novel one person is grinding through — it’s a shared garden of paths, some long, some short, some abandoned, some still growing tonight.
Reading a bloom
A bloom is a bud that’s ready to be followed — past its growing window and still open for the next writer to extend. Reading on branchline means picking a bloom and walking the path of ancestor buds above it, from the seed down to the bloom itself — a linear sequence of buds by (usually) several different authors, stitched together by the choices earlier readers-turned-writers made along the way. The home feed surfaces the blooms that are open right now: the ones readers are pollinating, the paths that are still open to be extended.
Writing the next bud
When you finish reading a bloom you can keep going. The bloom you just read becomes the parent of whatever you write next. Two simple rules shape the pacing:
- A 24-hour growing window. A bud can’t be built on for the first day after it’s written. That gives its author and its first readers a quiet moment with it before anyone else takes the next step.
- No back-to-back self-replies. You can’t extend your own bud directly. Two authors can ping-pong, but no one writes a whole novel under one handle. The form insists on company.
Together these rules turn writing into something closer to conversation than to authorship — you make a move, then you wait to see who answers.
Pollen
Pollen is the only signal branchline asks for. One grain per reader per bud, no scores, no axes. Pollen feeds the bloom ranking on the home feed and decays over time, so what you see is the writing readers are responding to now, not the writing that happened to be first.
Built on the AT Protocol
branchline is an AppView over the AT Protocol. You sign in with your existing atproto handle (your Bluesky account works), and every bud you write is stored as a record in your repository, on your PDS, under a DID you control. branchline indexes those records so other people can find and read them, but the canonical copy is always yours. If you delete a bud from your repo, it falls out of the index. If branchline disappears tomorrow, your writing doesn’t.
For the full breakdown of what branchline stores, what it asks permission for, and what it never touches, see the policy page.
Where this is going
branchline is in early development. The seed list is small and hand-curated. The ranking is a first pass. Bookmarks, follows, and per-story feeds are on the way. The shape of the form — short buds, branching trees, shared authorship — is the part that’s settled. Everything around it is still being written, which feels like the right way to build something about writing together.