In 1989, the internet was invented to help researchers at CERN more easily share ideas and communicate. The incredible growth of the internet that came after needs no further introduction. Yet in 2026, the original goals of the internet seem to have waned: the research community is fragmented across walled garden communities, basic tools and utilities require extortionate subscriptions paid to for-profit companies, and scientific publishing is controlled by a cartel of publishers who monetize work conducted in the public good. We believe that the full value of the internet has not been achieved for research, and today, we're excited to announce a new not-for-profit initiative to try and help to fix that.
Aster.id provides an account and hosting for researchers1 on the open web: a place where you build and own your identity (@you.aster.id), website, data and connections. An Aster ID is an entry point to the Atmosphere2: the world of apps and services built on the AT Protocol, the technology that powers Bluesky. Think Blacksky or Eurosky, but for researchers.
Your Aster ID gives you access not just to Bluesky, but to a vibrant ecosystem of apps and in particular ATScience - the slice of the Atmosphere geared towards researchers, including over 30 apps and tools for publishing, data sharing, annotation, curation and more! This means that even if traditional social media (e.g., general micro-blogging platforms like Bluesky) isn't your jam, there are many more apps you can benefit from as a researcher.
Aster joins ATScience as a non-profit, open-source, community-led initiative of researchers and builders, fiscally and legally hosted by the Modal Foundation.
Why now?
Science social media has great potential but lacks a home
The last few years have not been great for science. Public trust is at historic lows, and research is straining under mounting pressures — not least the way we publish and communicate science, which is long overdue for an upgrade.
Social media has a pivotal role to play in the next evolution of science: it’s a vital communication network both for researchers among themselves as well as with the broader public. Many would love to see it evolve to support new forms of science publishing, review and curation. And it’s a democratizing force in science, enabling the public to participate more directly in the process of research.
But science social media has lacked a real home. For a few short years, the science scene on Twitter (or Science Twitter as it was affectionately known) felt like it, opening our eyes to the vast potential of social media for researchers. But it never really was our home, as the restructuring of Twitter made painfully clear.
The open web can be that home
The loss of Science Twitter taught us a valuable lesson in what it means to have a home online. Home means controlling our platforms: accounts, data, algorithms, moderation and networks.
It also opened a unique opportunity: thousands of researchers migrated from Twitter to Bluesky, which now hosts a vibrant science community on par with Twitter in terms of the amount of research shared. Bluesky is part of the open web, meaning that it is built on open infrastructure (AT Protocol) that communities can run and shape according to their needs. For example, communities like Blacksky, Northsky and Eurosky run their own hosting, moderation and feeds. In the Atmosphere, apps can't lock you in since your account lives in a repository that belongs to you, not the app. So a user that doesn't agree with Bluesky's moderation policies can seamlessly migrate their account to a different host.
And researchers can shape it according to their unique needs
The Atmosphere is a big place: it includes microblogging3, long-form publishing4, music discovery5, coding6, livestreaming7, and even funding platforms8.
Researchers can benefit from all of these, but we also have needs of our own. That's what the 30+ apps in ATScience are building for, including preprints on , collective curation on , a client tailored for researchers on Lea, research feeds like , and professional profiles on . They all share the Atmosphere's superpower: one account that works everywhere, with your data and network following you rather than staying locked in an app. We're building Aster to be the identity and data hosting layer underpinning all of this potential for researchers on the Atmosphere — not for profit, and built by researchers, for researchers.
Aster also has lofty ambitions of its own, and we are incredibly excited to share some of our upcoming features supplementary to account hosting. First on our roadmap: personal websites for researchers that build and update themselves from your Aster data. More coming soon ✨
We also plan to explore trust and verification services, which an identity provider is well placed to offer, and which matter more than ever in an age of AI-mediated science.
Who’s behind Aster ID?
The idea for Aster was sparked at Atmosphere Conf 2026 in follow up conversations after the ATScience workshop. A group of us were discussing the Eurosky launch and thought - why not try this for research, too?
Currently, Aster is being developed by an expanded group of people from the original Atmosphere Conf discussion and the ATScience team. In the medium-term, we will expand Aster's governance to include members of its community and to be governed according to templates laid out by many other open source projects that exist in the public good.
On that note: Aster is a not-for-profit initiative. In fact, it will never be for profit. We are a collective of researchers building to benefit our community. That said, durably funding open research infrastructure is complex, as it requires balancing open science values with the challenges of long term sustainability. We will be following the evolving best practices in the space, such as the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure and commons-based approaches to open-access science.
Sounds great! When can I sign up?
We're launching Aster as an invite-only beta at IOSP 2026 in Leiden (October 12–15), and will open up onboarding gradually from there.
Why start small? Running community infrastructure is hard, and there's plenty we're still figuring out —above all, how to balance openness with protection from abuse. We want Aster to welcome researchers of all kinds, including the many who work outside traditional institutions. But a .aster.id handle is only worth having if people can trust it. Luckily, we're in good company: the Atmosphere is already home to several wonderful community-run infrastructure projects that we're learning from, including Blacksky, Eurosky and Northsky.
We'll be working through these questions in the open. Subscribe to our blog to stay tuned (and weigh in!), and join our Roomy space if you want to get more involved. We also have a few more details on our FAQ page.
Finally, a big thank you to for the generous grant that got us started, and to the Modal Foundation for hosting our project fiscally and legally. To Eurosky and especially for the awesome tech stack support. And of course to all the lovely individuals on the ATScience Roomy and Signal chats who are investing the time and energy to make this real.