Social media has incidentally wound up being the place a lot of research discussion happens, but it wasn’t intentionally designed to support this. It lacks many of the features that would make further discussion and discovery easy and enjoyable. So we (Maria Antoniak, Eugene Vinitsky) created Lea. 

Lea is a social media space intentionally designed for discovery, discussion, and serendipity. We asked ourselves, and our beta-testers, what would make this a better experience and came up with this preliminary set of features that we’re launched with. 

  • Conference pages. Track all the conversation that’s happening, post and find events, and keep track of the papers you’d like to attend.

  • Paper discussion aggregation. See all the discussion about any paper pulled together into one place.

  • Research-focused profiles. Share your favorite papers, highlight your favorite recent work, follow folks co-author chains.

  • LaTeX support.

  • Arbitrary length posts and post editing. For when you make that mistake that is haunting you.

  • Research-focused discovery. See all the papers and technical blog posts that are trending that day and all the associated discussion.

There are also a lot of other features related to custom feeds, moderation, verification, and notifications. We hope you have fun exploring and discovering!

How is Lea built? Lea is part of the Atmosphere and built on the AT Protocol, the same protocol that Bluesky, Blacksky, Eurosky, and many other social apps use (including Leaflet, where you’re reading this right now!). If you have an account on any of these platforms, you can already log into Lea and bring your posts and network with you. And the best part — you can also take your data with you if you leave Lea. Everything that happens on Lea is also visible on Bluesky, so you can switch back and forth to your heart’s content. Your data is yours, and we are just one of many windows onto that data!

Who can use Lea? Anyone! We specifically envision researchers and scientists across industry and academia might enjoy Lea, including graduate students, professors, librarians, and research scientists. But Lea is open to everyone, and we also welcome journalists, citizen scientists, community organizers, and anyone interested in open discourse about research!

A few caveats! Lea is currently an experimental website without a mobile app (but you can use it via your mobile browser on your phone!). Maria and Euguene are both busy junior professors, so we’ve only been able to put limited time into Lea, and there are still so many features to build and bugs to iron out. We have used Claude heavily in our construction of Lea. But we are also both passionate about building useful things and contributing to our research communities, and we’re hopeful about this project continuing to grow. 

Lea is always in development and changing fast so come, give it a try, and let us know how to make it even better. And if you have design, engineering, ATProto, security, or other skills and would like to be part of the volunteer team, please reach out!