7 posts

What is Lost Atlas? Let's find out using atlas itself! This list is part of the official atlas about section, documenting and explaining what atlas can do using the list/post format atlas is built on.

What is Atlas?

Atlas is a collection of information in time (and sometimes space) and the tools to collect and share (or not share) that information.

Posts

Posts can theoretically represent any sort of geographic information. For example, here's a post about Rockaway Beach!

Rockaway BeachNot all those who live in NYC know you can actually catch some pretty sweet breaks at Rockaway beach, renting your board from Peter of Surf's Up NYC or Boarders14d ago

You can make a post using the "+" button, at your current location, or anywhere.

P is for Postadded 4d ago

But what are posts without a way to organize them and control access? That brings us to...

Lists!

Lists in NYCadded 4d ago

Lists are flexible containers, or even tags that posts can be added to. A single post about rockaway beach doesn't mean much without context. For me, that context is surfing. So I added it to a surfing list.

Surfing in the Northeast3 posts4d ago

This is an example list with just three examples, but there's not limit to the amount of posts a list can have. In fact, a list can contain OTHER lists too. They can also be expressed as Artiles, like the one you're reading now!!

Access

Lists also function as access control. Lists can have one of four main types of access:

private: for your eyes only
friends: any of your friends on atlas can see this
unlisted: anyone can technically see it, but it won't be indexed by search engines or shown on discover page
public: all atlas users will be shown this on the discover tab!

If you're more interested in finding new things, go here:

The Discover Tabadded 4d ago

If you want more control, you got it. You can also:

let people add to your lists as well by unlocking them
give specific people access to a list

Philosophy

The format of information here has a central philosophy: our world is built of places, but each of us has separate worlds. Inviting others in is a beautiful thing, but the richness of those worlds is actually upheld by exclusivity of context. Not EVERYONE needs to be invited to every world, and as a result, each separate one remains special and unique.

Time

You can search not only space, but also time, using the time controls:

Timeadded 4d ago

Add times to posts so that they are searchable in this way. Useful for this List of Open Mics we're working on.

Other Stuff

You can use atlas anonymously! You don't have to log in.
You can use atlas programatically - head to the developer page to easily make tokens for use with ingestion scripts
Use the embedded LLM agent to make stuff for you