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?

Ooh no, please do, but would love to hear more!

Go chime in and share your work here: https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/about-the-atproto-s...

That'll get us connected off HN

I think Cosmik is the group I was thinking of that has also put out some initial poc like yourself

id also be curious to follow this if you have any links or resources

This is probably a good jumping off point

https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/about-the-atproto-s...

I am afraid that gatekeeping is partially essential and somewhat desired, as an academic you don't have time to read everything and some sort of quick signals, albeit very flawed, can be useful to stop wasting time reading crappy science. If you don't gatekeep you will get a lot of crappy papers or papers that mention the same thing and it will waste more time from people that wish to get a quick sense of the state of a topic/field from quality work. An open source voting system would be easily abused, so it will end up to be trusting a select service of peer reviewers or agencies. Especially if a paper includes a lot of experiments and figures that can be somewhat complicated or overwhelming. What do think?

I'm inclined to agree, and yet the past decade of ML on arxiv moving at a breakneck pace seems to be a counterexample. In that case I observe citation "bubbles" where I can follow one good paper up and down the citation graph to find others.

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. 3 experts specifically asked to review a paper versus a thousands random scientists is probably still the better option. Larger, technically impressive multi-disciplinary papers with 20+ authors are basically impossible to review alone, you would like a few experts on the main methods to review it together in harmony.

This is solved by social trust graph algorithms. These allow intersubjective ranking without a central authority.

Nothing based on DOIs and OCRIDs will ever be properly decentralised.

You need content addressing and cryptographic signatures for that.

Email is pretty decentralized without those things.

And it is infamously insecure, full of spam, and struggles with attachments beyond 10mB.

So thank you for bringing it up, it showcases well that a distributed system is not automatically a good distributed system, and why you want encryption, cryptographic fingerprints and cryptographic provenance tracking.

And yet, it is a constantly used decentralized system which does not require content addressing, as you mentioned. You should elaborate why we need content addressing for a decentralized system instead of saying "10MiB limit + spam lol email fell off". Contemporary usage of technologies you've mentioned don't seem to do much to reduce spam (see IPFS which has hard content addressing). Please, share more.

@criomsoneer: Check out Open Science Network (Bonfire), they are also doing interesting work in this space! https://openscience.network/

Integrate them peer review process and you’ve got a disrupter

Peer review should be disrupted, but doing peer review via social media is not the way to go.

Has a bit of a leg up in that if it's only academics commenting, it would probably be way more usable than typical social media, maybe even outright good.

Right? This is kind of the dream.

Calling it peer review suggests gatekeeping. I suggest no gatekeepind just let any academic post a review, and maybe upvote/downvote and let crowdsourcing handle the rest.

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.

Yes publishing is broken, but academics are the last people to jump onto platforms...they never left email. If you want to change the publishing game, turn publishing into email.

In whose interests would it be for academics to "leave email"?

Theirs? (Personally, I think not.)