Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

Post by verdverm » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

nosuchthing wrote: post #23

verdverm wrote: post #2

Are you aware of the current efforts by researchers on Bluesky to build a new researchers platform on ATProto? (Forget the project name at the moment) If not, same handle over there, I can get you in touch with them. Or hit up Boris, he knows everyone and is happy to make connections There's also a full day at the upcoming conference on ATProto & scientific related things. I think they com on discourse more (?)

Isn't ATProto just a compromised version of Activity Pub, basically designed around an excuse to force all users into a data mining firehose structure like twitter used to have only there's no privacy features or federation for moderation controls?

Post by verdverm » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

greentea23 wrote: post #26

nosuchthing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't ATProto just a compromised version of Activity Pub, basically designed around an excuse to force all users into a data mining firehose structure like twitter used to have only there's no privacy features or federation for moderation controls?

Yes. Nostr and ActivityPub are so easy too, I don't see much advantage to ATProto and so many disadvantages. It's as decentralized as a meme coin, just waiting for the rug pull. To me something git-like with a peer review UI (a la pull requests) seems far more natural for distributed academic publications than a social media protocol though.

Post by Murskautuminen » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 2:57 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #29

Murskautuminen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for smaller software papers or ML learning on arxiv this might work. For larger papers on biomedical or hard-tech, I think it is much less likely. I struggle to keep up with BioRxiv.org as a medical professional, many articles would require 2 hours+ to confidently review as a professional and I would never trust a "public" review algorithm or network to necessarily do a great job. If you allow weekly updates…

> many articles would require 2 hours+ to confidently review as a professional I think ML (and really all other fields) are the same. Skimming a paper never really leaves you certain of how rigorous it is. I agree that a naive "just add voting" "review" mechanism would not suffice to replace journals. However there's no requirement that the review algorithm be so naive. Looked at differently, what is a journal except…

Post by staplers » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #30

staplers wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I appreciate no gatekeeping, the other side of the coin is gatekeeping via bots (vote manipulation). Something like rotten tomatoes could be useful. Have a list of "verified" users (critic score) in a separate voting column as anon users (audience score). This will often serve useful in highly controversial situations to parse common narratives.

I'm not sure anonymous users should be able to join. Arxiv's system of only allowing academic users seems fine for this, although exceptions could be made for industry researchers.