Cosmik Updates: July 2026

Hello everyone,

Lots of updates for July so we’ll dive right in.

Cosmik

• @wesleyfinck.org presented Semble at DWeb Camp Berlin! Check out his talk notes, “Lego Brick Commons & Spontaneous Collaboration”, for a playful take on nerdy concepts like modular science. We will share the video recording once available.
• We started a new blog series on sensemaking patterns we're observing on Semble. In the first post, “Sensors, not Just Bookmarks”, @ronentk.me explored how bookmarks, when combined with social networks, create new “sensor networks” for collective sensemaking.
• Cosmik is co-organizing an ATScience workshop at IOSP 2026 (Oct 12–15, Leiden), a build-focused gathering for open science practices and infrastructure! The workshop, “Own your research network with AT Protocol”, will be a hands-on experience for researchers to learn about Semble and other ATScience apps and services. Registration is open - please consider joining us in Holland :)
• We’re excited to support Erin Kissane’s Cloud Atlas initiative to make the value of the AT Protocol ecosystem (”the Atmosphere”) more legible to the broader public!

Semble

• "What are some good reads on the network today?" Semble MCP is here! Connect Semble to Claude and other AI tools, ask questions about your library and the wider network, and act on the answers without leaving the chat.
• Semble now supports Subscriptions 🔔  Following a collection puts its activity in your feed; subscribing turns it into a notification. Subscriptions are a way to tune in deliberately to the collections and curators you don't want to miss.
• We redesigned the Semble landing page! 💫

Community

• Check out this awesome visualization of the Sembleverse by @davidgasquez.com, which includes over 30k links clustered by topics. (announcement post, source code)

Source: https://bsky.app/profile/davidgasquez.com/post/3mrwrp6pcms22

• @ianvanagas.bsky.social added Semble to their agentic research and writing stack as a trusted source for quality information. Wanting to “pay it forward”, Ian also built a skill that extracts links from notes, saves them as cards, and connects them to what's already on the Semble network — all of which the MCP now makes easier.
• @rafmbatista.bsky.social opened a Semble collection for the International Conference on Computational Social Science 2026 (IC2S2), where anyone can add their own conference related content (posts, papers, etc). We’re excited to see Semble complementing traditional conference feeds: the feed carries the live conversations, while Semble becomes a space where knowledge can connect and compound beyond the conference.

Let your Zotero references roam on Semble

• Chris shipped an early preview of Zemble, a Zotero plugin for Semble. It surfaces Semble and Atmosphere activity inside your Zotero library, lets you save and view Zotero items on Semble, and publish Zotero collections as Semble collections.

• Many of us have long compiled valuable reading lists and literature surveys on Zotero but have lacked a way to effectively share them. As @oli.zilla.org.uk commented “This is the missing piece for me to let my references roam on Semble”
• Following the Zemble launch, we saw researchers creating new collections on Semble, from democracy at work to bone systems research. For a moment we even topped the charts of new AT Protocol data being created across the app ecosystem 📈

Interop improvements

• Chris also launched a community proposal for web pages to declare AT records in links, using a simple at: meta tag. It means any app can recognize a link to a Semble card or a Leaflet post and render it richly, thus improving interoperability across the ecosystem. Semble, along with close to 20 other atproto apps implemented it within days, demonstrating strong asabiyyah

Cellosophical explorations with Semble and ATScience

• @ranganaut.bsky.social announced the Cellosophy initiative, an exciting attempt to spark a new field: studying cognition and intelligence in single-celled organisms through a synthetic-philosophy lens. Rajesh is not only exploring a new research field, he's also pioneering new ways of doing research, networked and in the open, using AT Protocol apps like Semble and Leaflet.

Source: https://cellosophy.leaflet.pub/3mrfxeygsas2d

On our radar

• supercritical - excellent new metascience blog series by Ashish Uppala, about “what happens when systems produce faster than they can coordinate.”
• Holdfast 0: Situating - Inspiring essay from Erin Kissane on the promise of new networks and tools for collective knowledge (with a shout out to Semble!)
• Dutch Mastodon pilot for research and education institutions - Dutch Universities are jointly exploring Mastodon as an open source platform for education and research in the Netherlands. Part of the pilot includes usage of a Mastodon bot to track research contributions. Exciting, and hopefully just the start of a much bigger trend of research institutions adopting open social platforms for science publishing and communication!
• Comprehensive survey from Aris.pub on scholarly reading tools in the age of AI.
• We have been thoroughly enjoying revisiting Michael Nielsen's evergreen "Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science". Remarkable how over a decade ago Nielsen pointed the way towards solving long standing issues plaguing science to this day (issues that are all the more relevant in the age of AI mediated science):

Imagine a connected online web of scientific knowledge that integrates and connects data, computer code, chains of scientific reasoning, descriptions of open problems, and beyond. That web of scientific knowledge could incorporate video, virtual worlds, and augmented reality, as well as more conventional media, such as papers. And it would be tightly integrated with a scientific social web that directs scientists' attention where it is most valuable, releasing enormous collaborative potential.

What stayed with us most, is Nielsen's vision for radical democratization of science, through new forms of citizen science:

Cynics will say that most people aren’t smart or interested enough to make a contribution to science. I believe that projects such as Galaxy Zoo and Foldit show those cynics are wrong. Most people are plenty smart enough to make a contribution to science, and many of them are interested. All that’s lacking are tools that help connect them to the scientific community in ways that let them make that contribution. Today, we can build those tools.

Imagine the tools we can build today, more than a decade later, with powerful AI and open social protocols like AT Protocol.

Meanwhile, Galaxy Zoo, where volunteers classify galaxies, was launched in 2007 and is still going. As volunteer moderator Alice Sheppard put it, the contributions people made were "as stunning as the sight of any spiral, and never fail to move me.”

Large scale human collaboration really is as beautiful as the cosmos itself 🌌

Until next time,

— Team Cosmik

ps - Semblers is officially a thing, so if you see Semblers in a future post, don’t say you weren’t warned