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1/ 📢 @cosmik.network has been awarded $1M in grant funding by Open Philanthropy and @asterainstitute.bsky.social These generous grants will support our development of Semble - a social "micro-knowledge" network for researchers on Bluesky/ATProto. Think Are.na + Goodreads for research!

2/ Why now? Because the stars are aligning for new kinds of social media for researchers ✨

3/ Bluesky has become a major science social media hub, and data is open 💙 Bluesky now regularly eclipses Twitter for research sharing despite being much smaller. bsky.app/profile/did:...

4/ But we can do more than just recreate the Twitter look and feel on Bluesky! Existing social media spaces aren’t designed for science: they’re noisy and are prone to collective attention warping due to hype and misguided amplification bsky.app/profile/shah...

5/ Some of this is inherent to feeds - they’re linear, ephemeral and biased toward virality. Nuanced insights get buried. We’re inspired by curation tools like @are.na: creative, intentional and non-linear. bsky.app/profile/dana...

6/ Goodreads is another inspiration for how “micro-knowledge” can aggregate into meaningful impact. As @aj-boston.bsky.social writes, why *don’t* we have something like Science Goodreads yet? bsky.app/profile/rone...

7/ Judging by posts like this, it isn’t for lack of interest … x.com/sanjehorah/s...

9/ Finally, the silver lining in all the recent chaos (Science Twitter's decline, extractive platforms selling data to AI companies, funding cuts, etc) is the new space being created for rethinking everything, from how we publish to who owns our data

10/ Enter Semble. Imagine research "playlists," assessments like Science Goodreads, or a place to connect over share interests and find peers to explore research rabbit holes, together.

11/ Semble is being built on ATProto, so *you* own your identity and data. We’re building towards an ecosystem of diverse, decentralized, and interoperating apps - not platform monoliths. bsky.app/profile/jay....