We at the Modal Foundation are excited to share the news of our support for Aster.id, a new home for researchers on the open web. Aster grows out of the ATscience initiative, which works to build and drive adoption of open social tools for knowledge communities.
Aster is a rapidly evolving project of researchers, scientists, and others involved in the production of knowledge. It will host research-focused applications, infrastructure and communities that use AT Protocol, beginning with a user account on atproto (@you.aster.id). It will eventually offer hosting to build websites, be a starting point for access to a collection of online tools for knowledge creation, organization, and publishing, and offer an array of social functions that support scientific and research work.
Aster is Modal’s next incubation project, following our flagship initiative, Eurosky1. We aspire to a future for social tech beyond massive, general purpose applications, driven by the imperative of capital accumulation to lock us in to extractive relationships with tech corporations. Aster and Modal share a vision of data owned and organized by communities and knowledge creators. We both want to place the creation, discussion and dissemination of knowledge at the heart of social interaction. And, we see sociality as an important function to improve the production and understanding of knowledge, because we conceive of knowledge creation as fundamentally embedded in social relations.
Modal’s role includes technical support for building and maintaining infrastructure, such as Aster’s personal data servers (a core layer of the AT Protocol stack), and sharing our technical and organizational capacity. The interoperability inherent in the design of atproto means that we can share our infrastructure, building from Eurosky services, and iteratively create related products for adjacent goals.
Beyond that, many of us at Modal are eager participants in the emerging community of researchers and scientists making their own online homes. Social tech for research means much more than microblogging; existing projects focus on shared data standards, dialogic spaces, collections, preprint services, long-form writing, and professional profiles. We look forward to joining Aster in the journey to reorient knowledge communities around a new generation of social technologies that are built, owned, and maintained by the people that use them.
We are also especially grateful to Peter Wang, who generously contributed initial funds to launch Aster.
Read more about Aster.id at aster.place and in their announcement, and follow them online on any Atmosphere microblogging service, or on their blog.