This month’s theme is one that is especially dear to us: how personal knowledge becomes collective knowledge. Personal knowledge tools like Notion and Obsidian are increasingly popular, partly due to the realization that in the age of AI, curated personal knowledge bases can pay big dividends. But Obsidian calls personal knowledge bases “vaults” for a reason - they are designed to be personal and secure, and there are no simple ways to connect them together or to integrate them in a social network with discovery, notifications and other kinds of social interactions.
Semble and AT Protocol are starting to change that, by providing new ways to connect personal knowledge tools while also protecting user agency and data sovereignty. This month we launched a new Semble Obsidian plugin and launched , an exciting new Obsidian-style markdown editor that syncs over AT Protocol. launched , a visual canvas for mapping Semble collections and Margin annotations in a connected graph. And ’s integrates these into a comprehensive social reader.
As suggested, perhaps the Atmosphere can become the Noosphere1...
Read on for the full story.
Cosmik
and were in charming Leiden for the IOSP 2026 conference where they co-organized an workshop along with @byarielm.fyi, and . We introduced researchers to Semble (see the slides) and ATProto Science, and worked on the theory of change for how these support the broader open science ecosystem. The workshop also marked the official launch of , and we onboarded our first users to Aster!
@byarielm.fyi officiating the launch of @aster.id, home of researchers on the Atmosphere! Society is plural, democracy is plural — piece by piece we're making the internet plural as well.
Along with our friends , at Leiden we also started planning the 2027 edition of the ATScience conference, stay tuned!
Wes presented Semble at the October DWeb virtual meetup.
Semble
We launched Semble Collect, our new Obsidian plugin. Semble Collect lets you save the links in any note to Semble, and see social context for each link - who else saved it or what related links others have added to the network.
Calling all Obsidian users! We now have an Obsidian plugin that lets you easily manage links in your notes using Semble. Install it here: community.obsidian.md/plugins/semb... read more here: blog.cosmik.network/3mybawxqrf22h Setup details below 🥳
We added metadata extraction from OpenReview URLs, to support ’s use of Semble in their workshop at COLM (see Community section below).
Following user feedback, connections are now animated so it’s easier to see the direction of the relation between links.
Curious about how you can use Semble for your research? We have a new "Semble for Research" docs page, with tips and examples we’ve seen on Semble.
Community
Max () co-organized a workshop on social simulations with LLMs at the Conference On Language Modelling (COLM), and used Semble + agents to organize submissions into a knowledge graph. They also ran some other interesting experiments using AI in an interactive group setting, where groups critique AI-generated research proposals drawn from the gaps in the workshop’s own accepted papers. Check out their detailed writeup and see the Semble knowledge graph here
shipped two rounds of Semble features in Skyreader this month! A new “New connections” lane shows when people on Semble connect articles you’ve saved, with who made each connection and how the pieces relate (supports, opposes, leads to, and so on). It works even if you don’t use Semble yourself. Skyreader now also suggests a connection when you finish an article, lets you connect links as you read, and syncs collections both ways with public Semble or collections.
launched Assemblage, an infinite canvas where Semble cards and collections and Margin annotations become nodes you can arrange and connect - a way to step back and see a collection as a whole. Or, as the Assemblage tagline puts it - “Draw Conclusions.”
Screenshot of Assemblage
’s Atmosphere For You is a personalized feed that works across Atmosphere apps, and it works really well! It finds people who liked the same Bluesky posts as you, then shows what they’ve recently engaged with on other Atmosphere apps: saved on Semble, starred on (code dev), reviewed on (Goodreads alternative on atproto), etc. Open protocol ecosystems FTW.
On our Radar
Reimagining Scientific Discovery: Collective Intelligence Through the Convergence of Citizen Science and Computational Systems. Inspiring vision for science in the age of AI, advocating for human-machine systems in which citizen scientists participate as monitors, interpreters and co-producers of knowledge.
On Learning to Ride Your Brain. "Perhaps the most important educational challenge of the AI era is not teaching people to code, prompt, or even critically evaluate machine-generated information. Those are useful skills, but they are downstream of something more basic: learning to maintain dynamically stabilized control over your own cognitive activity, and then extending that control to a coupled system with a powerful generative machine."
AI and The Enclosure of the Scientific Commons. Suggests that "AI provides precisely the tools needed to enable a previously-infeasible enclosure of the information commons." We think that decentralized protocols like AT Protocol provide the tools needed to create resilient information commons. "Re-commoning" science is part of our theory of change at Cosmik, and we think that a commons-based approach is central to realizing a more sustainable, aligned and democratic scientific enterprise. See this Semble collection for more: