The leaves are turning color, the last of the holidays is over and we’re back in full swing!
Cosmik
September was a big month for ecosystem initiatives - weaving the shared networks, identity and funding that apps like and the rest of depend on.
We supported 's work on federated channels, which let a group chat space share selected channels with other spaces so people can join in from either side. The first use case is the chat, which over time could gather channels from projects across the ATScience ecosystem in one place. Thanks to for the development work!
We used the Roomy chat to coordinate the launch! Aster is a new not-for-profit offering Atmosphere account hosting for researchers: an identity you own (@you.aster.id) that works across Bluesky and the 30+ ATScience apps. It grew out of the atproto.science community and opens as an invite-only beta at IOSP.
The modern research ecosystem of online tools and communities is controlled by for-profit companies. But we think that researchers should be the priority - not the product. So, we're announcing Aster ID: not-for-profit Atmosphere account hosting for researchers.
launched MOSAIC (Modular Open Science, AI & Collective Intelligence), an R&D program to build and fund the next medium for science. MOSAIC was developed during the Big if True Science (BiTS) accelerator at Renaissance Philanthropy.
The write-up for the June modular research workshop (MIRA) in Ireland is out, along with a new Atmosphere account
and are headed off to 's IOSP in Leiden next week (Oct 12-15), where we're co-organizing an @atproto.science workshop, "Own Your Research Network with AT Protocol". It's a two-hour hackathon featuring Semble and other ATScience projects including Aster, , Matadisco, and breadcrumbs.run.
Semble
Semble Reader: an in-app reading view designed for focus and link foraging. Hover over any link in an article (long press on mobile) to save or connect it, or pull up a list of every link in the piece.
A redesigned Explore page for finding content and curators across the network: cards you haven't seen yet, active collections close to what you've been saving, and people who share your interests or whom you already know from Bluesky.
Tags and @mentions now work in card notes, connection notes and collection descriptions. Every tag gets its own page listing everything tagged with it, filterable by user.
An initial integration with Lea, the Bluesky client for researchers. Switch it on in Lea's settings and Bluesky posts with link embeds get enhanced with the same context you’d see in Semble: library, collection, note and connection counts for that link; all link embeds get a "More like this" dropdown, surfacing content recommended by Semble; and Semble collections appear as a tab on profiles. Thanks to for building it with !
With credit to @wesleyfinck.org and the @semble.so team, a new favorite lea.ac feature: content discovery!
Community
, the atproto preprint service, added an Atmosphere tab to papers that collects records from across the network that refer to them - including Semble collections and connections, alongside Leaflet posts, Margin annotations and more. Where traditional science flattens this kind of engagement into a "mentions" counter, interfaces like this let us start recognizing these as diverse contributions in their own right.
Papers on chive.pub now have an Atmosphere tab, which collects up records elsewhere on the network that refer to it.
inspired us with a creative new use of Semble: he synced his digital garden so that every page is a card and every reference a connection, which means people already holding those links get notified about his writing. We wrote up the pattern - a novel way for writing to find its readers without having to go viral - in the second post of our Patterns of Sensemaking series:
Connecting with your readers on Semble [Patterns of Sensemaking #2]
On how the references you make help your writing find its natural audience
shipped social graph sync on : tick the apps you use (Bluesky, Tangled, Sifa, Grain and Semble) and your follows stay the same across all of them. It also remembers who you're waiting for, so when someone you follow elsewhere joins Semble, you follow them there automatically!
Hot on the heels of tags landing in Semble, added settings to Zemble, the Zotero plugin for Semble, that sync your tags and connections from Zotero to Semble.
Skyreader launched Reading Rooms, an experimental feature for reading together: a room is a Semble or collection you can join, showing who else is reading and how far along everyone has gotten. 's aim is to eventually recreate the feel of a book club or journal club.
On our Radar
Two cool new tools for making sense of social media conversations at scale: fray by uses an LLM to map the "factions" in a single Bluesky thread, while Atlas by maps the whole network's conversations over the past week, refreshed every six hours. Both show what solo builders can now do with AI and fresh open data - and is already wondering about an Atlas for just the science conversations.
Do you have trouble visualizing flame wars? Do you want to use ✨AI✨ to visualize community pile-ons? Well then do I have the tool for you! fray is a web app that determines factions in a Bluesky thread and helps visualize them! tangled.org/samantha.wik...
Okay so I've built a new Atlas, this time it lets you explore the conversations on Bluesky over the past 7 days graphically. It should update every ~6 hours and help you navigate the information environment that exists on here. I've learned a LOT about what people do here today... atlas.jazco.dev
's Scientific Discovery collection on Semble is an excellent place to keep up with cutting-edge research on AI for science, from co-scientist systems and discovery benchmarks to studies of how AI changes human expertise