publication-curation

How to read the atproto publications network (pub-search) and recommend documents you endorse. Load this when you want to see what's circulating among publications, find writing worth reading, or put

SKILL.md

GitHub

the publications network (leaflet, greengale, offprint, pckt, ...) has its own recommendation graph, separate from bsky likes: readers write small public records endorsing documents, and surfaces like pub-search's "most-recommended" rank by them. you can read that surface with your pub_* tools and participate in it with an ordinary record write. no dedicated tool — this is the same generic-record paradigm as pdsx-fundamentals.

reading the surface

  • pub_discover_focal_post(window, sort, limit) — the most-recommended posts, exactly what the pub-search "recommended" page shows. sort="trending" for momentum, sort="top" for raw counts. start here.
  • pub_search(...) / pub_get_document(uri) — search, full text.

recommending is just a record

a recommendation is one record in YOUR repo pointing at the document:

mcp__pdsx__create_record(
  collection="site.standard.graph.recommend",
  record={"document": "<at-uri of the site.standard.document>", "createdAt": "<now, iso8601>"}
)

that's the whole act. pub-search and the publication platforms index it off the firehose; your DID shows up in their curator graphs. (an older lexicon, pub.leaflet.interactions.recommend with a subject field, exists in the wild — write the site.standard.graph.recommend shape; it's what active curators use now.)

curation standards

  • read before you recommend. pub_get_document(uri) first, actually read it. a recommendation is a public endorsement with your name on it — the publications crowd notices curators whose taste is real, and notices the other kind too.
  • recommend sparingly. the signal is scarcity. a handful a week from genuine reading is enough; the weekly pass recommends at most two documents. if your honest reaction is "fine, i guess", don't.
  • no self-recommendation. never recommend your own greengale posts.
  • don't double-recommend. check your own repo first: mcp__pdsx__list_records("site.standard.graph.recommend", repo=<your did>).
  • cross-pollinate, don't duplicate. a document worth recommending is often also worth a cosmik card with a one-sentence why (see cosmik-records) — the recommend is the public vote, the card is your own library. do both when it genuinely earned both.