[tomnicholas1]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how one thing science needs is a social network for sharing big data.

One thing the post gets at is that providing a decentralized global subscribable data catalog is fundamentally a network protocol problem, somewhat similar to RSS.

The social network analogy is particularly generative here - because the desired network structure is similar to that of Federated social media, the protocol I want would be very similar in structure to those protocols underlying attempts to decentralize social media platforms. I therefore think it might well be possible to build what I’m suggesting by piggybacking off of BlueSky’s AT protocol or the Fediverse/Mastodon’s ActivityPub protocol.

I’ve made a repo[1] for discussing ideas for how one might implement such a protocol.

Curious what people think of any of this!

[1] https://github.com/TomNicholas/FROST