Cosmik New Year: 2025 in Review, and Looking Forward to 2026

As we begin 2026, we want to share some thoughts for the upcoming year and also take a moment to reflect on 2025 which has been an exciting year for Cosmik.

Launching Semble

The headline for 2025 is the November alpha launch of Semble , our social "micro-knowledge" network for researchers. When we announced our grant funding from Open Philanthropy and Astera Institute back in August, we described Semble as Are.na meets “Goodreads for research”: a place where researchers can create, organize, and share knowledge in ways that complement traditional feed-centered social platforms. Five months later, that vision is live.

The response has been encouraging. In the two months since our launch, 150 users joined Semble, collectively creating over 5,000 cards. Sembling is now a thing:

We’re excited both by users seeing value in Semble as it currently is, as well as users sharing in and expanding on our vision of what it could become. As our friend and collaborator Erlend Sogge Heggen observed,

Semble is the most radical atproto app around, as it represents a departure from entertainment-feeds in favor of attainment-feeds (learning), which fundamentally changes the game of social media as we know it.

We've also released a public API, and we're already seeing community developers build on top of Semble. Projects include Raycast extensions, website integrations, and even explorations of how Semble could connect with tools like Bluesky bots ( see the full list on Semble ).

What We've Learned

Launching Semble has given us early evidence for a hypothesis we've long been excited to test: that the right interfaces can harness valuable " creative exhaust "—the thoughts, connections, and references that researchers generate but rarely share publicly. Semble also makes space for new kinds of knowledge creators—for example, we are noticing people who are quiet on Bluesky but who curate fascinating content on Semble.

We've also learned that ATProto is a wonderful ecosystem to be building in, and fertile ground for the kind of community-driven development we want to foster. ATProto’s emphasis on interoperability and user ownership aligns well with our vision, and there's growing institutional interest (such as the EuroSky initiative) that could help this ecosystem really come into its own.

That said, our alpha is still quite early with a lot of room for improvement. Users are finding value in the current version, but we know there is significant potential for expansion, both on the creation side (for example, integrations making it easier for users to add content to Semble) and the discovery side (for example by surfacing relevant connections and helping users’ content get seen).

Building the Ecosystem

Alongside product development, we've invested significantly in ecosystem building—connecting with aligned organizations and helping foster communities that share our vision for the next generation of collaborative research infrastructure.

Some highlights:

We launched the ATProto Science community and are now organizing the first ATProto for Science workshop , scheduled for Vancouver in March 2026. This will bring together researchers, developers, and institutions interested in building research applications on open protocols.

We initiated CAIROS (Collective Augmented Intelligence for Research & Open Science) in partnership with the Discourse Graphs team. This initiative explores how research communities might collectively own and govern their knowledge infrastructure—a crucial piece of the puzzle for long-term resilience and sustainability.

We joined the Continuous Science Foundation 's Modular Peer Review working group and have been participating in Renaissance Philanthropy 's Future of Science Curation conversations.

These connections are helping us weave together something bigger than any single product could be. As we recently put it: the killer app in open social protocols is a killer ecosystem.

( source )

Events and Presentations

This year took us to many events, where we've had the opportunity to share our vision and learn from others working on similar problems. Highlights include:

AGU 2025 Conference (December, New Orleans): Presented Building Collective Intelligence Networks for Flourishing Scientific Communities

Berkman Klein Center Applied Social Media Lab (December, Cambridge): Showcased Cosmik and Semble ( slides )

IETF Session on ATProto (November, Montreal): Participated in discussions about the protocol's future

Foundations for the Digital Commons (October, Portland): Joined workshops on building shared digital infrastructure

Looking Ahead to 2026

The coming year will focus on four priorities.

First, we'll continue to build out Semble's core functionality by improving personalization and discovery, making collections more collaborative, and AI enhancements. We'll also add more research-specific features to Semble, such as citation metadata, annotation tools, and relations between cards. Throughout this process, we're committed to building in the open and actively incorporating feedback from the community to shape our development priorities.

Second, we’ll develop integrations with other research platforms as well as ATproto tools. These integrations will help Semble meet researchers where they are, support novel workflows, and enable capabilities that no single app could offer alone.

We’re eyeing a rapidly growing list of exciting integrations, including:

Discourse Graphs for knowledge synthesis and structured micropublishing

Seams.so and margins.at for atproto annotations

Lanyards and ORCID for credentials

Roomy.space for empowering link sharing in group chats

Leaflet for weaving Semble into long form writing

Chive for adding Semble data and affordances to preprints on ATProto

Bluesky integrations for tapping into the rich discussions already happening there

Lea ( the exciting new Bluesky research client ) for connecting Semble more directly with Science Bluesky

Third, we’ll be investing in IRL gatherings for high bandwidth sensemaking and community building. We will participate in and co-organize events with ecosystem partners, including ATScience 2026 in March and the Modular Interoperable Research Attribution (MIRA) workshop in June.

Finally, we'll be ramping up our efforts around sustainability. We’ll explore novel philanthropic funding models like Focused Research Organizations and Coordinated Research Programs . Through CAIROS we will develop our longer-term vision of self-reliant and self-sustaining research commons—potentially through individual and institutional memberships, data trusts, or hybrid models like Mozilla's.

Thank You

None of this work would be possible without the support of Open Philanthropy and the Astera Institute, whose generous grants have allowed us to pursue this vision. We're also deeply grateful to our early users, advisors and collaborators who have shaped our thinking and helped us understand what the community actually needs.

2025 was the year Semble went from concept to working product. 2026 will be about making Semble shine—and weaving it into a vibrant ecosystem for collective intelligence.