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Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing (octosphere.social)

64 points by crimsoneer ↗ HN
Hey HN! I went to an ATProto meetup last week, and as a burnt-out semi-academic who hates academic publishing, I thought there might be a cool opportunity to build on Octopus (https://www.octopus.ac/), so I got a bit excited over the weekend and built Octosphere.

Hopefully some of you find it interesting! Blog post here: https://andreasthinks.me/posts/octosphere/octosphere.html

10 comments

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verdverm
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 (?)

nosuchthing
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?
gnarlouse
Integrate them peer review process and you’ve got a disrupter
11101010010001
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.
fghorow
In whose interests would it be for academics to "leave email"?

Theirs? (Personally, I think not.)

Murskautuminen
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?
perfmode
This is solved by social trust graph algorithms. These allow intersubjective ranking without a central authority.
fc417fc802
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.
j-pb
Nothing based on DOIs and OCRIDs will ever be properly decentralised.

You need content addressing and cryptographic signatures for that.