Overview
Lichen is a wiki app built on AT Protocol, the open network behind Bluesky. Your wikis are saved on your own AT Protocol account, not on this box, so they stay yours if you move to another app. This box runs a Lichen site that reads those wikis, shows them, and lets people edit them together.
Features
- Notes written in plain markdown, with
[[wikilinks]]and backlinks - Edit the same note at the same time with other people, cursors included
- Every edit is kept as a diff, so the whole history stays
- Public or private wikis, with admin, contributor and viewer roles
- Import an Obsidian vault from a zip, and download any wiki back as one
- Tags, drag-and-drop images, a live preview, and math and Mermaid diagrams
- Link two wikis written in different languages, and a switcher appears
Setting up
Sign in with an AT Protocol account, such as a Bluesky account. Type your handle on the sign-in page. This app has no accounts of its own.
By default only you can open this app. Open its access setting and switch it to Public before you share a wiki. Readers and co-authors need to reach the site and the sign-in page.
Good to know
Lichen needs a public web address, so it is available on hosted boxes only. Sign-in works by your account's server calling back to this site, and a home network address cannot receive that call.
Your wikis live on your own AT Protocol account. This box keeps an index of them, so removing the app does not delete your wikis. The box needs internet access to follow the network for changes.
Every page also loads two small visitor counters run by the Lichen project:
one at stats.lichen.wiki, and one from Cloudflare. They set no cookies and
they count page views, and they cannot be turned off from here. The page
counts go to the project, not to this box.
All visitors share one set of rate limits, such as 5 sign-in attempts a minute, 30 searches a minute and 3 wiki exports a minute for the whole site. A busy public site can hit them, and everyone is slowed down at once.