The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

Twitter spent ten years as the de facto online platform for astronomy networking and outreach. However, semi-recent events have seen it devolve into a politicized and ineffective platform for science communication and networking. The loss of Twitter has shown how fleeting online spaces can be. It begs the question: can we do better, or are astronomers doomed to always have their online homes tied to the whims of a billionaire?

In this talk, I will present The Astrosky Ecosystem: An open source project to build independent social media infrastructure with the AT Protocol, the social media protocol that powers Bluesky (a prominent Twitter challenger). I will start by presenting a brief outline of the AT Protocol, showing how the technology to build and run independent and interoperable social media infrastructure now exists, bringing incredible new possibilities.

Next, I will present our project's previous two years of progress. We began in 2023 as a small, indie project to move astronomers to a new platform while running a 'custom feed' of astronomy posts. Two years on, our project now hosts over a dozen custom feeds, viewed over 2 million times per month by over 20,000 unique users. Some of our nearly 2000 posters include large astronomy organizations like ESA, ESO, the AAS, and Rubin. Our project also recently progressed in its sustainability, adding new developer and moderation teams in addition to working towards fiscal sustainability through crowdfunding.

I will discuss our future plans to start doing secure, EU-based AT Protocol/Bluesky account hosting - meaning that astronomers and astronomy organizations will never need to change platform again. Finally, I will discuss how other astronomy software projects could integrate with our ecosystem, given the almost-limitless extensibility of the AT Protocol, in addition to sharing lessons learnt in our quest for >99.9% uptime.