Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing
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Hey HN! I went to an ATProto meetup last week, and as a burnt-out semi-academic who hates academic publishing, I thought there might be a cool opportunity to build on Octopus (https://www.octopus.ac/), so I got a bit excited over the weekend and built Octosphere.Hopefully some of you find it interesting! Blog post here: https://andreasthinks.me/posts/octosphere/octosphere.html
HN · launched Feb 3, 2026 · 64 upvotes (top 15%) · 0 views
Niche: digital publishing and reading platforms · 122 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Marketplace
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 122 launches in digital publishing and reading platforms →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a specialized web frontend/client built on top of the open Octopus academic platform and AT Protocol using standard APIs and web frameworks.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ArXiv, BioRxiv, ActivityPub, Nostr, XMPP
Concerns raised: Reviewer quality and expertise verification at scale, Cannot handle high paper volume (100+ papers/week) with adequate review, Biomedical/hard-tech papers require 2+ hours per review, unsuitable for public review, Potential bias/friend-citation network interactions among academic reviewers, ATProto less decentralized in practice than ActivityPub, harder to self-host
Feature requests: Account portability across instances, Content addressing and cryptographic provenance tracking, Gating to verified academics/scientists with bias prevention, Support for large datasets/binaries beyond email-like limits, Cryptographically bound content identity and signatures
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 120 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #26 of 121 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 95 days after the earliest competitor.
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