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The social internet — for science! I'm super excited to see @aster.id launching. It's an Atmosphere service provider (like @eurosky.social) for researchers, hosted by your friends at the @modalfoundation.eurosky.social. Why does it matter? Thread time! 🧵

Aster ID@aster.id

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.

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So much of research happens on proprietary tools and — this might be a familiar story — those tools are monopolistic, overpriced, and for the most part really, really shit. Like Facebook redesigned Teams and gave it to the Google Search team levels of shit. This has been very hard to break.

The Atmosphere is showing signs that we have a path to transforming that world. If you haven't noticed that AT is about much, much more than microblogging, please look again. I mean, just look at this ATScience ecosystem map! And this is barely the beginning: mu.social/profile/atpr...

ATProto Science@atproto.science

We made a thing! Check out our new #ATScience ecosystem map ✨ All projects, organized in one place: atproto.science/ecosystem/

The social internet is an internet in which people are first-class citizens: it adds identity, owning your data, collaboration, and universal data publishing. It's not just that it can do more than microblogging — it's a great match for research (amongst others). It could really accelerate things.

Helping research is very cool — but in return it helps microblogging. If you know the internet, you know that successful spaces are made by 1) shitposters, 2) the weirder artists, 3) the community around horny/trans/furry Rust/Elixir developers, and 4) intense scholars of various fields.