Cosmik Updates: August 2026

The theme of this month is AT Protocol apps organizing in the very real sense of the word:

Cosmik

• We had a great time at the @atproto.nyc community day! @ronentk.me gave a lightning talk about Semble and co-organized two workshop sessions on funding the Atmosphere and ATScience.
• We launched the ATScience Ecosystem Map along with the @atproto.science crew, to keep track of all the wonderful projects organizing in the space. Let us know if we missed something, or submit a project directly at forms.atproto.science/submit-project

Semble

• Extension. The Semble Extension is out on Firefox and Chrome (Safari soon)! Save any link in a click, search Semble from your tab, highlight a passage to save it as a note, draw connections between saves, and see related articles and media on any page you visit.
• Onboarding. We now have in-app onboarding at semble.so/onboarding to quickly get up to speed on how to use Semble. As part of building the onboarding flow, we also shipped a new feature to help you find your Bluesky network to follow on Semble. Worth a run even if you're not new: https://semble.so/settings/bluesky-follows.
  1. @wesleyfinck.org shared some early insights from the onboarding data - atproto, science, design and software development are the most commonly selected topics of interest.
• New connection types. Two more Connection types shipped: References (A mentions or discusses B, for example a podcast episode that discusses a paper) and Same as (A and B point at the same underlying thing, like two URLs hosting the same podcast episode).

Community

• @disnetdev.com's latest SkyReader updates demonstrate the beauty of protocol ecosystems - for each article, SkyReader now shows @leaflet.pub comments and @margin.at annotations alongside Semble connections and related links, and you can add a related Semble article to your reading list in one tap. Reading, commenting, annotation and curation experiences provided by multiple apps and all seamlessly integrated. Give it a try - https://skyreader.app/

• @samclemente.me integrated anypub.at (their new atproto CMS for long form publishing) with Semble and Margin, so you can draw on your Semble collections as raw material for blog posts.

• @lchoshen.bsky.social shared the repo for ATProto-links-bot, which relays paper links shared in their Lab Discord out to Bluesky, Semble, Mastodon and RSS.
• @scoiattolo.mountainherder.xyz described a fun Semble/AI-powered reading workflow: after reading an article, they hand it to their bot, which uses the Semble MCP to save it and answer "what else is like this?"

On our Radar

So many great pieces this month! As usual, you can also follow them on Semble.

• Lea, an exciting new research-oriented social app from @mariaa.bsky.social and @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social, built on AT Protocol. It enriches the normal Bluesky experience by adding conference pages, LaTeX, arbitrary-length posts, and aggregation of all the discussions about a given paper into one place. As @joelchan86.bsky.social observed, Lea and Semble pair well for social sensemaking of science, and we’re excited to explore how these apps can further complement each other.

• The Ground Truth Institute by Denisa Lepadatu and Ed Boyden asks what if engineering a scientific revolution is partly a problem of organizing humans and coordinating effort. Their sketch of a supporting publication system is strikingly close to the modular research vision we're building toward: a new medium for science where an idea, a result or a critique each count as a citable, credit-conferring publication, including documented failures.
• A Robust Decentralized Infrastructure for Trust-Aware Open Knowledge Sharing by @tobiaskuhn.bsky.social and colleagues at Knowledge Pixels, on the second-generation nanopublication ecosystem and its trust algorithm. The paper notes that decentralized social protocols are increasingly being taken up for scholarly collaboration, and cites both Semble and @atproto.science as examples — a nice signal that these two worlds are converging.
• "The Least Agentic People Alive" by @beenwrekt.bsky.social, on the arms races we've talked ourselves into treating as inevitable: everyone complaining about the NeurIPS submission flood while continuing to submit, review and chair. His alternative is the same vision we're building towards: researchers can collectively design better systems to generate, evaluate, and share knowledge.
• "Epistemic Stigmergy: Natural vs. Artificial Intelligence" by Rosen Lutskanov looks at AI from the perspective of stigmergy, a form of self-organization that produces intelligent behavior without central control. Ants, termites and slime molds solve hard optimization problems with almost no individual cognition, stigmergically, i.e., by coordinating through the traces they leave in a shared environment. The paper extends the same mechanism to science — the 5,000-author Higgs paper as a “colony” spread across continents. The paper argues for stigmergically interacting AI and humans sharing the same substrate (and we have some ideas on how to implement this...)

Friends of the blog will know that stigmergy is one of our favorite concepts and part of our origin story. Perhaps more than any other concept, it illustrates how "thinking is an instrument that serves collective action." (Lutskanov)

Thanks for reading, and see you on the (stigmergic) trails