Header image: project logo (Janine Jochum)

In July 2023, I started The Astrosky Ecosystem - a project to build integrations with the AT Protocol for the Astronomy community. Our main project thus far has been the Astronomy feeds on Bluesky, which see an average of nearly 92,000 unique visitors per week - making them into an amazing tool for outreach! We just put a short conference proceeding on the arXiv about the project, detailing the motivation, technical background, and some stats about the Astronomy feeds so far.

In short: it’s quite normal in astronomy that we get to use fantastic, free tools for (almost) everything we do - including NASA’s ADS, the CDS astronomy data centre, or astropy. But social media is different: despite these tools being fantastic for outreach and science communication, we’re stuck relying on big tech monopolies to not destroy the platforms at any time of their choosing - which is exactly what happened to Twitter.

That’s why we’re building ways for astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts to have independent social media access for outreach and communication. You can read more about the project in the paper or on our website!