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.
Somewhat selfishly, I’d suggest she try Mbin instead. It allows her to interact with both the microblog side of the fediverse (including bridges) and the thread side, from the same interface.
She’s not interested in using any social media at all, she just wants a place to toot about her publications because it’s part of the job. So some Mastodon instance specific to her field is pretty much as good as it gets for her usecase. As an academic the domain-specific Mastodon instances are pretty great.
I like Mbin a lot though! :)
I’d rather them become a not-for-profit instead of a non-profit.
Is there a meaningful difference in how they operate?
No. The latter is just British English.
Think of a co-op vs charity.
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
Had a typo in there. It’s eschew
Threads acknowledges the fediverse like Microsoft acknowledged IRC. Their goal is to drain out the voices of all instances, since that is the only way to defeat a product not owned by a single entity. Will they accomplish it? Most likely not, but that doesn’t make them any more appealing.
I don’t remember MSN Messenger being able to handle IRC chats. If it had, I wouldn’t have needed an IRC client. But Threads won’t drown out other voices, they’ll just add voices to the conversation. There’s content on Threads that’s worth following, and I don’t think it’s valuable to lose that because of a few engagement farms that you can either personally block or defederate.
Threads is, in my experience, a poor user experience. Lots of engagement farming and repeated posts, and bots.
Hasn’t been my experience, but I’m mostly in a sphere of scientists, creatives, and memes. A couple art museums post some great stuff too.
Mostly leftists for me, I seem to get loads of “suggested for you” as well.
Most social media has a leftward bias. Avoiding politics in any form of social media now is like trying to avoid plankton in ocean water - you might be able to do it, but you’ll need a really tight filter.
You can always choose an instance that defederates Threads, that the beauty of the open web
Doesn’t make threads itself any more open. If the only thing that matters to be “open” is the individual’s ability to block content from them why not “federate” with twitter?
You say that like I don’t want to federate with twitter, and then choose who I block.
Because let’s face it, 95% of the profiles ARE on twitter. Not everybody who uses social media gives one shit about open source. I’d say most on mastodon DO, but I’d say the vast majority on bluesky DON’T.
This will help you understand why bluesky has 24.5 active million users, and mastodon has 1.5 million active users.
Twitters new reputation is a rightwing hellhole. THAT’S why they’re bleeding users. Bluesky is exactly like twitter in functionality, but left wing leaning.
Mastodon isn’t political by nature, but functions very differently. The people who care about open source, and decentralized, and all these other things, those people signed up for mastodon. Everybody else who didn’t care, didn’t.
Now to be fair, mastodon has 10 million registered users, but only 1.5 active users. Compare that to blueskys 25 million users, with 24.5 active users.
Given mastodon’s older age compared to bluesky, it suggests to me that at some point in the past, people signed up for mastodon as an alternative to twitter…and by large have left the platform.
My speculation is that it probably happened when must bought twitter 2 years ago. Before bluesky became popular. Then they left when they realized mastodon works differently than twitter.
Personally I wouldn’t enjoy sorting through hundreds of twitter scam bots every day just for the sake of choice.
Then you can choose to block twitter. But don’t say that because YOU want to block twitter that EVERYONE should.
I’ve yet to meet a single person that enjoys twitter bots, but hey maybe the people running them would love to interact with the fediverse!
I mean that’s not the only thing, I can follow this MBin account that I’m using to talk with you from Threads, and I can interact with Threads posts as well, I’ve even gotten likes from there
Something like that is impossible with Twitter, altho I wouldn’t be fully against the idea to reconnect with a few people I know who refused to leave it for whatever reason
Also, look at the bright side, people that use Threads at least don’t use Twitter, I think it’s a small step in the right direction, no?
Also, look at the bright side, people that use Threads at least don’t use Twitter, I think it’s a small step in the right direction, no?
Depends on why you dislike twitter.
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.
