About Aster
Aster gives scientists and academics the infrastructure they need to get the most out of the Atmosphere - the open social web where Bluesky and many other interoperable apps are growing together.
What that means
- Your Aster identity (
yourname.aster.id) and Personal Data Store (PDS) is yours: if you ever decide to move elsewhere, you can take your content and network with you - you'll never be locked in. - Your Aster account works with all Atmosphere apps, including those we’re developing as well as the growing ATScience ecosystem of research apps and services.
- All apps are "uncapturable" by any one company or organisation, so enshittification is impossible - just like the open Web, but social.
More: FAQ: What is the Atmosphere?
All Aster products are designed for researchers and academics, who have been early adopters since Bluesky's launch.
Aster itself is a project of ATScience, a non-profit, open-source community of researchers and developers building science-focused Atmosphere apps, fiscally hosted by the Modal Foundation.
Preparing for alpha launch
As of now (September/October 2026), Aster is just getting started. We're launching our first product - Aster identity and PDS service - as an invite-only service at IOSP 2026, so we can learn from a small group of early adopters before releasing Aster more widely.
In parallel, we’re developing more products - see FAQ: What other products and services are planned?.
Reach out, join in
We've learnt a lot preparing Aster for launch, and aim to continue learning in public. So if you have any questions or ideas, or would simply like to get in touch:
- Check out our FAQs.
- Subscribe to, read and comment on our Leaflet blog, where we're exploring the hard questions ("What does "for scientists and researcher" actually mean? How will you check? Will you moderate? How?")
- Follow and reach out to us on Bluesky (see FAQ: What's ATScience? Who’s on the Aster team?)