Bridgy Fed, a project to connect the open social web, is now becoming a nonprofit | TechCrunch
Bridgy Fed, a project to connect the open social web, is now becoming a nonprofit | TechCrunch
Bridgy Fed, which is working to connect the social network Bluesky with the wider fediverse (i.e., the open social web), which includes sites like
Bridgy Fed, which is working to connect the social network Bluesky with the wider fediverse (i.e., the open social web), which includes sites like Mastodon and others, will be the first app incubated within a new nonprofit called A New Social. The organization, announced Tuesday, aims to bring together developers, researchers, startups, and industry leaders building infrastructure for the open social web, including those adopting protocols like Bluesky’s AT Protocol and ActivityPub, which powers Mastodon, Meta’s Threads, and the rest of the fediverse.
Fun fact: If you use software that support following people like MBin, you can bridge your account too and follow BlueSky folk
Oh neat. I've been aware of this for a while and I'm glad in an academic sense that it exists. I guess I would need more people that I care about who are on Bluesky.
As an academic, there are several users on Bluesky I would like to follow. Sadly very few are bridged for now. Hopefully all Bluesky accounts will be open for bridging at some point.
Another advantage is that thanks to Bridgy I can convince my partner to join Mastodon instead of Bluesky to promote her work, as the reach is the same on either platform.
THIS is what I keep telling people. The fediverse will win in the end as long as it bridges out to everyone. Because eventually the centralized services will die, or lose popularity. Myspace is dead. HotOrNot is dead. Digg is dead. Friendster is dead. Facebook is dying. YahooIM is dead. AOLIM/AIM is dead. ICQ is dead. MSN Messanger is dead.
All these communication services died because they were centrally supported. But if MissKey dies, the fediverse doesn't die. The MissKey users just migrate to a new service.
Now if twitter, and threads, and facebook, and reddit, and instagram, and all these other services integrate with the fediverse, the fediverse benefits. And if meta dies in 2042, that's fine. Threads will go away, and facebook, and whatsapp, and instagram will all go away. But the users will say "Now, I heard about pixelfed. Instagram is gone, lets just go to pixelfed."
Whereas HotOrNot users didn't have a fediverse they COULD federate with. So back then, the website just died, and nobody's heard of that concept for a website. There was no replacement. The userbase just ceased to exist.
The pillars for centralized services will fall in time with or without the fediverse. But WITH the fediverse connected before they fall, you implant the suggestion that there IS more out there to an audience that otherwise had no idea the fediverse existed.
Only reason I know of Lemmy/the fediverse is because I got autobanned from reddit. I went out of my way to search for a reddit replacement. Prior to that, I had no idea the fediverse existed. I think I vaguely heard of mastodon......but had no idea it was connected to a bigger network.
I'd rather them become a not-for-profit instead of a non-profit.
Is there a meaningful difference in how they operate?
Think of a co-op vs charity.
No. The latter is just British English.
Ah yes, Threads, a great example of the open web!
Threads is a great example of a company acknowledging that the open web exists and bringing content people want to places where they want to be. I'd like to be able to interact with everyone through one or two accounts, not have to maintain a Meta account, an Mbin account, a Google account, and all the rest.
You may not like it, but I believe the open web is about things like Threads being federated - individual platforms interacting freely, no matter who built them.
Yeah. Peoples concerns around Meta and EEE notwithstanding, ActivityPub is an open standard maintained by the W3C. It's meant to be used by anyone and everyone, just like HTTP is. The desire is to give options that esshew social silos, not to create social wilderness outside of the corporate city states
What I see is more bots, and cross posting ads made easy 🥲
To be fair there's a lot of ad spam bots that I see on Mastodon as it is.. I see better moderation tools as a solution, not being a walled garden
Exactly
But the fediverse solves that with federation, right? Connectivity and choosing where your connections are is the whole point.
Or is that short sighted? Seriously asking.
Blocking an instance is a powerful tool if it is what you have in mind. Blocking or defederating with such activitypub bridge may have unwanted side effects. It has been discussed before, when meta moved closer to the fediverse. Some kind of fediverse split may happen : those who connect with wallet garden platforms vs the others living in the fediverse as we know it today.