Meeting notes: eurosky.social x atproto x science

eurosky.social x atproto x science
@tgoerke.bsky.social
Scheduled
10 October 2025 08:00 am EDT

ATProto Science is about using ATProto for science applications, such as publishing, curation, data sharing or social discourse around research.

Eurosky is a new initiative to build shared European infrastructure, on the AT Protocol, that works across social media, search, news and e-commerce.

Explore overlap of those initiatives and the people involved.

Participants

Please give a quick intro to yourself. Thanks a lot.

  • Torsten Goerke, CODIP
  • Emily Hunt, Astronomy feeds
  • Ronen Tamari, used Twitter quite a lot during PhD; made the shift to Bsky; post-PhD co-founded Cosmik as part of the Astera Institute Open Science startup accelerator
  • Enrico , software engineer and former BBC London employee, works on setting up Eurosky infra; How can we make things easier to develop, Documentation? SDKs?
  • Sherif Elsayed-Ali, FoF, Eurosky

Notes

Will be shared in Discourse

  • Ronen: The plan is to do an ATProto Science event at the ATmosphere Conference at the end of March 2026 in Vancouver

Q to Emily:

  • do you want to self-host a PDS or would you prefer to buy a service (possibly subsidised)?
    ** Emily: would like the idea of a buy service but would be really nice to have complete ownership e.g. what happens if the underlying service disappear
    ** Need to solve the legal framework, wants some level of frontend

Q to Ronen:

  • complexity on scaling Semble?

Q to Torsten:

  • issues with approaching academia admin?
    ** use case that make sense for researchers
    ** compliance with legal stuff

  • Torsten wants to run a relay - or maybe just a PDS

Q: by Ronen

General Q from me going forward with these discussions - Curious about mapping out the different ATProto services and applications that scholarly institutions / communities are interested in.

Also it’s great that we can learn from Emily and the Astrosky community!

  • Ronen: Curious about data archiving guarantees for science infra? Eg how to make sure data isn’t lost when an org runs out of money or volunteers

  • Torsten: Maybe next step: Work on a shared roadmap?

Summary and call to action

Mapping out the different ATProto services and applications that scholarly institutions / communities are interested in.

Urgency for Decentralization:

  1. Strong consensus that scholarly institutions must accelerate decentralization and reduce reliance on US-hosted infrastructure
  2. Driven by current political situation and perceived pressures on entities like Bluesky Inc.

Saved chat

2025-10-10 14:15:44 From Ronen Tamari To Everyone:
Will also by hybrid

2025-10-10 14:15:48 From Ronen Tamari To Everyone:
be*

2025-10-10 14:17:12 From Ronen Tamari To Everyone:
For a little more context re March - the plan is to do an ATProto Science event at the ATmosphere Conference at the end of March 2026 in Vancouver

2025-10-10 14:28:03 From Ronen Tamari To Everyone:
General Q from me going forward with these discussions - Curious about mapping out the different ATProto services and applications that scholarly institutions / communities are interested in.

Also it’s great that we can learn from Emily and the Astrosky community!

2025-10-10 14:39:25 From Ronen Tamari To Everyone:
Hi @Sherif Elsayed-Ali !

2025-10-10 14:41:50 From Ronen Tamari To Everyone:
Curious about data archiving guarantees for science infra? Eg how to make sure data isn’t lost when an org runs out of money or volunteers

2025-10-10 14:43:18 From Emily To Everyone:
I thought about this too. Financially, I think having projects on e.g. Open Collective (which The Astrosky Ecosystem now is) at least means the financials are open. I then thought about if there could be some kind of backup tech that would allow people to a) personally backup their data and b) warn people if stuff breaks
Ronen Tamari::+1:

2025-10-10 14:44:08 From Emily To Everyone:
I could imagine something a bit like a ‘dead man’s handle’ as trains have except for a PDS. So if admins stop maintaining something it sends out an email to all users urging them to migrate away

2025-10-10 14:44:45 From Enrico To Everyone:
Replying to " I thought about this too. Financially, I think ha…":
yes I’m looking into this

2025-10-10 14:45:17 From Emily To Everyone:
Replying to " I thought about this too. Financially, I think ha…":
:+1:

2025-10-10 14:45:29 From Enrico To Everyone:
Replying to " I thought about this too. Financially, I think ha…":
FYI PDS+ https://litestream.io/ + S3 Replication
I want to create ready-to-be-deplopyed templates

2025-10-10 14:45:30 From Ronen Tamari To Everyone:
Yes that makes sense. If there is enough demand, there might be space for a cross community service that provides hosting for science communities data

2025-10-10 14:45:56 From Ronen Tamari To Everyone:
Kind of like infra such as Zenodo which provides free hosting for research

2025-10-10 14:47:05 From Enrico To Everyone:
Replying to " I thought about this too. Financially, I think ha…":
although with the hindsight I’m not sure that’s what you meant

2025-10-10 14:47:33 From Torsten Goerke To Everyone:
Maybe next step: Work on a shared roadmap?
Ronen Tamari::+1:

2025-10-10 14:48:22 From Ronen Tamari To Everyone:

2025-10-10 14:50:37 From Torsten Goerke To Everyone:

2025-10-10 14:55:54 From Sherif Elsayed-Ali To Everyone:
What do you think of Roost?

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Re templates to quickly create PDSs there is a Railway PDS Template and for PDS backup there is bsky.storage using the Storacha network. I don’t know if there are web-based admin tools for PDS ops as requested by @emily.space but maybe this can be integrated into the existing migration tools?

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Storacha is for user level backups of accounts.

The data on a PDS is in blobs (which should use an S3 compatible service) and the SQLlite files for each account which can be backed up with regular server / file backup techniques.

1 Like