X-ray Peeps
Synchrotrons are remarkably quiet online. Where are the beamline scientists, engineers, roboticists, users and students actually talking? I keep wondering whether I'm simply looking in the wrong places, or whether the community has grown up without a shared public space at all. It feels unusual compared to almost every other part of my life—cycling, baking, surfing, rockets—where people gather online to contribute, argue, teach and learn. Synchrotrons seem almost invisible to newcomers and even to people working across the broader ecosystem. There are some exceptions. Lightsources.org is a great example, and conferences bring us together, although they're deliciously ephemeral and usually organised around techniques or specific research areas rather than the wider synchrotron world. But where is the public forum for beamline scientists, controls engineers, roboticists, data engineers, users, students and industry partners? I keep looking for it. I even created r/synchrotrons but, alas, so far it's mostly just me. This is probably a call to arms more than anything else. If the synchrotron community wants an online presence, we'll have to build it ourselves. I want r/synchrotrons to become somewhere I actually visit: a place for memes, stories, engineering hacks, software releases, ragebait, science celebrities and the kind of conversations that normally happen over coffee at conferences. One of the most collaborative infrastructures in science has no obvious public commons, talking head or news outlet for the people who actually make it work. If that place already exists, I'd genuinely love to know where it is.
