Hey Mike, the new Observable looks great and I'm really enjoying it so far. But wanted to let you know there's one key thing missing that made me come back to Observable every day in its early years — the community aspect. New cool notebooks from others used to be the centerpiece, and it was exciting to follow favorite engineers and see what they build, and get others to comment on mine too — and now I can't even find the explore page. It feels lonely here now, and removing all sense of data viz community from the product feels like a huge step in the wrong direction. Hope you have some cool improvements coming on this front, because I miss that aspect of the old Observable a lot.

@mourner We totally agree! The community is what pulled us in, too. And then we pivoted hard away from it c. 2023 to notionally serve business use cases better, and in fact IMO we ended up serving both use cases worse. It’s also hard because I think part of what we miss is a period in the general global zeitgeist that has dissipated. The data visualization discourse in general feels less like a community to me in 2026 than it did ten years ago. Maybe part of that is our fault!! Maybe I’m just older lol. Fortunately, in other ways, 2026 is an ideal time for building community around computational artifacts, if people are hungry for more human connection. I don’t know if it’s clear yet, but “A new Observable” very much represents a pivot back toward community. Or rather: back toward a view that community and business are synergistic, and that the boundary between them is diaphanous and permeable. Of course, it’s on us to make that clear through our actions as well as our words. So far the two notable efforts are: 1. Personal workspaces. Mike wrote extensively about this here: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/a-better-individual-experience. We did a lot of backend cleanup work to unwind an unhealthy paradigm in which every user got wrapped in a weird “shell company” framed as a “starter” workspace, as if every person will one day metamorphose into a large enterprise. 2. The public workspace, https://observablehq.com/public. This is effectively the current incarnation of the “Explore” page, and in some ways it’s the most robust it’s ever been. It has the trending/recent/top stuff, but you can also sort and filter and browse authors and collections, which didn’t used to be possible. This is accessible from the workspace switcher menu as “Public”. But maybe you couldn’t find it there! Or maybe it’s not what you were looking for? Have you seen that page? Historically, some of our community pages sat totally outside the normal navigation (e.g. https://old.observablehq.com/trending). Other incarnations sounded way too much like marketing, as if the community consisted only of officially rubber-stamped apparatchiks (e.g. https://old.observablehq.com/platform). I do think at times we struck the right balance, which I’d like to get back to. I wonder how much of this is a question of UI layout. For years, our site’s information architecture has totally segregated content by workspace. (Even the public workspace is structured as “a workspace”.) We have no single unified homepage for the many-faceted user who has a mix of private work and public community. We had that for a while, but it’s a real juggling act; more like composing a newspaper layout, less like designing a tool. We probably need to bring back a bit more of that. Part of the point of community is that spaces leak into each other; you pick up ambient context; you go to do some work and notice, off on the side, a new trending notebook; not everything is isomorphic to a normalized database view. We’re planning to add back an improved version of following soon (see https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/upcoming-features-fall-2026). We also wanna make comments more visible (like a view where you can see all public comments). And of course we need to bring back search. And I wanna want people to be able set a notebook as a profile “readme”… This got long lol. Thanks for writing Volodymyr! It ain’t a community without you!! How are you??

Thank you for the feedback, and excited to see you back here, Volodymyr! As Toph said, we’re putting a deliberate emphasis on community now, so I’m hoping your impression changes as you familiarize yourself with the new design and as we ship more planned improvements. Following will be available very soon. This lets you filter public notebooks to just people you follow, and you get a notification whenever someone you follow publishes a new notebook. As a creator, this will give you immediate feedback whenever you publish, since your followers get notified (like a computational Substack). And there are myriad smaller ways we’re improving the experience of working in public, including the return of personal workspaces and versioned publishing, and a redesigned Public page with better filtering and infinite scrolling. I’ve been thrilled by the quality of notebooks that people have been sharing recently. Definitely see https://observablehq.com/public if you didn’t find it before. (Public is also the very first link on the top-left of our homepage at /about!) I’ll think about how to make the Public page more discoverable… Maybe when we ship Following, that should become the default view rather than just your personal notebooks. Stay tuned!