Thank you. ❤️
Published on November 5, 2025 by Emily Hunt
It has been almost two months since we put our project on Open Collective, and the response from you - our community - has been completely overwhelming. I'm about to submit the second month of expenses for our hosting, paid for sustainably by everyone here. It's so awesome that that's possible!
For an update about things we're working on: we've been a little quiet over the past few months, in part due to my moving job & country. Personally, I'm now settled in; between that, some of our other developers having more time, and a new developer recruitment drive that we'll be starting shortly, we expect to pick up the pace and work on more new projects over the coming months.
Our main focus will be on getting independent user account hosting running - something that's possible on Bluesky, since it's built on the fully open AT Protocol. Bluesky has grown a lot, which unfortunately also means that it's starting to get noticed by the current US government. Offering free, independent, and EU-based account hosting to astronomers & the wider astronomy community will be essential to ensure that our community can stick around online, forever. Even if Bluesky runs into problems someday, hosting your data with us means that you could sign up right away for "Bluesky v2" and not lose your posts or followers.
A big challenge will be ensuring that we're EU law/GDPR-compliant, as well as that harmful content (e.g. CSAM) cannot be uploaded to our servers. In general, rapid progress is being made here by other organizations in the wider AT Protocol developer sphere - like Eurosky, who are putting together legal & code resources for groups interested in hosting accounts. We're hoping everything will be ready for us to start hosting accounts by the end of the year.
That we can even think about hosting user data is possible in large part thanks to you and your contributions. Because we know that our finances are secure, we can feel much more comfortable about asking users to trust us with their data.
Finally, another plan will be to promote our project more, including at conferences - which is also possible thanks to the amazing financial contributions that everyone has given us. Next week, I'll be presenting the project (remotely) at ADASS, a large conference of astronomy software developers. We're also thinking about writing a preprint/paper soon that will describe the project and its goals, as well as providing a citable reference that also benefits the early-career researchers on our team.
Once again, thank you so much for your support in helping to make the social web a better place. ❤️
- Emily
For an update about things we're working on: we've been a little quiet over the past few months, in part due to my moving job & country. Personally, I'm now settled in; between that, some of our other developers having more time, and a new developer recruitment drive that we'll be starting shortly, we expect to pick up the pace and work on more new projects over the coming months.
Our main focus will be on getting independent user account hosting running - something that's possible on Bluesky, since it's built on the fully open AT Protocol. Bluesky has grown a lot, which unfortunately also means that it's starting to get noticed by the current US government. Offering free, independent, and EU-based account hosting to astronomers & the wider astronomy community will be essential to ensure that our community can stick around online, forever. Even if Bluesky runs into problems someday, hosting your data with us means that you could sign up right away for "Bluesky v2" and not lose your posts or followers.
A big challenge will be ensuring that we're EU law/GDPR-compliant, as well as that harmful content (e.g. CSAM) cannot be uploaded to our servers. In general, rapid progress is being made here by other organizations in the wider AT Protocol developer sphere - like Eurosky, who are putting together legal & code resources for groups interested in hosting accounts. We're hoping everything will be ready for us to start hosting accounts by the end of the year.
That we can even think about hosting user data is possible in large part thanks to you and your contributions. Because we know that our finances are secure, we can feel much more comfortable about asking users to trust us with their data.
Finally, another plan will be to promote our project more, including at conferences - which is also possible thanks to the amazing financial contributions that everyone has given us. Next week, I'll be presenting the project (remotely) at ADASS, a large conference of astronomy software developers. We're also thinking about writing a preprint/paper soon that will describe the project and its goals, as well as providing a citable reference that also benefits the early-career researchers on our team.
Once again, thank you so much for your support in helping to make the social web a better place. ❤️
- Emily