Bridging preprints and the Fediverse: Start discussions on Sciety, and continue them everywhere

Announcing a powerful new feature to connect scholarly conversations across the open web

We're excited to share a milestone in open, scholarly communication; you can now initiate discussions about any preprint on Sciety and have those conversations seamlessly federate across the entire decentralised web.

Early experiments on Sciety allowed people to create lists of preprints and comment on articles in those lists. We're now expanding that capability to connect to decentralised social networks such as Bonfire, Mastodon and Bluesky. It's a fundamental shift in how scholarly discussions can work. When you start a discussion on Sciety, that conversation becomes part of the Fediverse, discoverable and participatory for researchers on our preprint focussed bonfire instance (discussions.sciety.org) and, if you choose, other Bonfire instances, Mastodon, any platform that speaks the ActivityPub protocol and Bluesky (via bridging functionality).

From siloed commentary to federated discourse

The problem we've been working to help solve is one many researchers know well: valuable conversations about preprints happen everywhere; on Twitter/X (increasingly less so), BlueSky, email threads, Slack channels, but these discussions remain disconnected from the research itself. They're ephemeral, hard to discover, and rarely get the recognition they deserve as legitimate scholarly contributions.

With our new integration between Sciety and Sciety Discussions (our customised instance of Bonfire's Open Science Network flavour), we're changing this. Here's how it works:

On any Sciety article page, you'll find a "Start a discussion" button. Click it, and you're taken to our Bonfire-powered discussion space where you can share your thoughts, questions, or insights about the work and the peer evaluation.

A social network designed for scientific discourse

Using the features enabled by our Open Science Network flavour of Bonfire, researchers benefit from several powerful capabilities:

ORCID Integration: Bonfire is a certified ORCID partner, meaning you can create rich researcher profiles that automatically pull in data from your ORCID record; publications, affiliations, and research interests. No manual data entry required.

Archival with DOIs: Discussions can be archived to Zenodo, receiving their own Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). This transforms casual scholarly conversations into citable, persistent, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) objects. Your contribution to understanding a preprint becomes a permanent part of the scholarly record.

Granular Control: The Bonfire platform gives you unprecedented control over your discussions. Set visibility boundaries (public, mentions-only, followers-only), manage who can quote or reply to your posts, and moderate your space according to community standards rather than algorithmic imperatives.

Multiple Profiles and Identity Control: With Bonfire, you can create multiple separate profiles under a single account; each with its own followers, content, and settings. These profiles are not publicly linked by default, meaning each appears as a distinct identity. In essence, this models the approach pioneered by platforms like PREreview, which supports both public profiles (linked to ORCID iDs with full attribution) and pseudonymous profiles (sharing only a chosen pseudonym and review activity) to protect reviewers from potential bias or career risks while still contributing valuable feedback. Unlike platforms that enforce a single identity model, Bonfire lets you navigate the spectrum between full public attribution and privacy protection on your own terms, ensuring that the scholarly conversation benefits from diverse voices that might otherwise remain silent.

Why This Matters

This bridge between preprint peer review and decentralised social media enables us to rethink and reshape how scholarly communication works:

Discussions become discoverable: Instead of scattered across multiple platforms, conversations about preprints are now linked directly to the research on Sciety, making them easy to find alongside peer reviews and evaluations.

Researchers get recognition: By making discussions citable with DOIs and linking them to ORCID profiles, we're helping the scholarly community recognize discussion and commentary as legitimate academic contributions.

Open infrastructure: Unlike commercial social media platforms, this infrastructure is open source, community-governed, and built on open protocols. No single entity controls the conversation, and your data remains portable.

Network effects without lock-in: Because we're using ActivityPub, you're not limited to discussing research with only Sciety users. You can engage with the broader federated network while maintaining institutional control over your data.

What's Next

This milestone is part of our broader NLnet-funded project to create reproducible, community-owned infrastructure for preprint discussions. We've been documenting our journey—from deploying Bonfire using NixOS for reproducible infrastructure, to co-designing workflows that integrate common scholarly tooling such as ORCID, DocMaps, COAR Notify, and ActivityPub.

The next piece of work will ensure that discourse from the open web appears on Sciety as part of the preprint's history.

We're currently working with early adopters to refine the experience and will be conducting user testing throughout the project. If you're interested in being part of this evolution in scholarly communication, we encourage you to:

1. Try it out: Visit any preprint on Sciety and start a discussion
2. Create your profile: Sign up at discussions.sciety.org using your email or ORCID credentials
3. Join the conversation: Follow researchers and topics that matter to you
4. Share your feedback: We're actively listening to the research community to shape this platform

The future of scholarly communication should be open, federated, and researcher-controlled. With this integration, we're taking a concrete step toward making that future a reality.

This work is made possible by funding from NLnet Foundation as part of their commitment to supporting open internet infrastructure, and through our partnership with Bonfire Networks, whose modular, federated approach to social networking makes this kind of innovation possible.

We're building this in the open and you can follow our technical progress and documentation on our project repository.