In the last couple of weeks we've made significant progress in establishing our new preprint discourse feature at discussions.sciety.org
š What's new?
Discussion Integration
Sciety is now able to respond dynamically to preprint discussions happening on social networks. Researchers now see either "Start a discussion" or "Join the discussion" based on whether discussions already exist for a specific paper and we're successfully querying the Bonfire API at discussions.sciety.org to check for existing discussions in real-time. This work establishes the technical foundations for connecting preprint peer evaluation to the open Social web.
Co-design with early career researchers
Sciety embraces participatory design, building alongside research
communities, ensuring their voices and experiences directly shape our
development. Over the past two weeks, we conducted co-design sessions with eLife Ambassadors to understand how they currently engage in preprint discourse using social media.
The findings revealed a clear overarching theme that current social media platforms are inadequate for meaningful scientific discourse, leading to fragmented communities, superficial engagement, and barriers to participation that particularly affect early-career researchers and underrepresented groups.
Some of the key insights from our sessions included:
- Platform fragmentation: Researchers are scattered across different platforms (LinkedIn, Bluesky, Twitter/X), each with different functionality and audiences. As one participant noted, "no single platform seems to get meaningful engagement."
- Motivation for sharing: Participants shared papers to notify authors, make work visible to interested audiences, and invite community engagement - but struggled with reaching the right scientific audience across platform boundaries. It was noted that different platforms have different lexicons, modalities of sharing and personal and professional contexts
- Identity and psychological safety concerns: Researchers want flexibility in how they share feedback, granular levels of identity including pseudonymous comments can feel safer especially when providing critical feedback. Participants noted how overwhelming it can be to see constant sharing of new publications while struggling with their own research progress, highlighting the
need for more supportive discussion environments and settings to support online wellbeing
How Bonfire's Open Science flavour addresses these challenges
The federated approach of Bonfire directly tackles these pain points. Instead of forcing researchers to choose a single platform, discussions.sciety.org connects to the broader Fediverse - meaning conversations can reach audiences on Bluesky, Mastodon, and other networks simultaneously. Researchers can maintain their existing social media presence while participating in more structured, scholarly discussions that become citable research objects with DOIs. The platform also supports flexible identity management and contextual, paper-specific discussions linked directly to DOIs, creating exactly the kind of meaningful scientific discourse our research participants were seeking.
Bonfire on NixOS
One of the early goals of our project was to explore and document deployment options for Bonfire running on NixOS (a fully declarative operating system). This allows grass roots communities and institutions to have granular control over their deployments and scale easily and cost-effectively. We're now putting the finishing touches around this deliverable, but after weeks of experimentation with different deployment options, we now have:
- Multiple deployment pathways: Nix-flakes for provisioning Bonfire on NixOS VMs across Hetzner Cloud and Digital Ocean
- Updated documentation: The Bonfire-Nix repository now contains a comprehensive setup guide for people to follow
Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be creating friendlier documentation to share with research communities, making it easier for institutions to host their own federated discussion instances.
ā© What's Next?
Automated discussion creation
We're now working to enable logged-in Sciety users to automatically generate a new discussion directly from within Sciety. The post will contain the relevant DOI from the paper activity page on Sciety, creating a discussion space for that paper in the Fediverse.
This enables new functionality aimed directly at researchers using open social networks. As explored in this latest post from the Bonfire OpenScience Network team, discussions on Bonfire can become citable research objects with their own DOIs. This means:
- Evaluated preprints shared to the Fediverse Discussions about Sciety's content will be discoverable across federated networks
- Cross-platform engagement Anyone can join discussions, follow the latest evaluated preprints, and participate from existing networks like Bluesky and Mastodon
- Scholarly discourse evolution Conversations about research on open social networks become part of the permanent scholarly record. Bonfire is the first social network to become an ORCID Certified Service Provider for Manuscript Submission Systems
This represents a fundamental shift toward truly open, federated scholarly communication where research discussions aren't siloed within individual platforms.
Join the preprint community at Sciety
Building on these insights, we're seeing growing interest in federated discussion networks for science and we'd love to hear from you about:
- How you envision using federated discussions in your research workflow
- What features would make scholarly conversations more valuable to your community
- Your experiences with cross-platform research communication
You can sign up and start experimenting today at discussions.sciety.org our preprint discourse network running on the open science flavour of Bonfire.
We're particularly interested in feedback from early adopters who want to shape how scholarly discussions evolve.
Book a 1:1 call to learn more about our progress and help shape the future of federated scholarly communication.
š Stay connected
You can follow our technical progress via documentation on Sciety's github repository and continue to connect with us on Mastodon and LinkedIn.
This work is made possible through funding from NLnet, supporting our mission to create more open and accessible scholarly communication infrastructure.