The Great Twitter Exodus of 2022 is still happening. It’s just a little…fractured. A lot of X power users migrated to Bluesky early on, which paved the way for a flood of folks to join that service in 2024. Meanwhile, a lot of technically inclined individuals are still hanging out on Mastodon (at least, that’s where I hang out).
Bluesky and Mastodon are both decentralized services, in theory, but users of one service can’t really talk to users on the other—or it wasn’t possible before Bridgy Fed, anyway. It’s a beta service that makes it possible for Bluesky and Fediverse-compatible applications, such as Mastodon, to interact.
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This is where Bridgy Fed comes in. With this service, individual users of either service can opt in to “bridging” their accounts. I tested this out with my friend and Lifehacker alumni Eric Ravenscraft, who hangs out on Bluesky more than me. It worked well—we can now see each other’s posts, like each other’s posts, and even talk to each other, cross-network.
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While this solution works well, there are a few hangups. Chiefly, it only functions if both people bridge their accounts. This means I can’t see any comments from Bluesky users unless they also are bridged, and vice versa: During our little test, a few other Mastodon users responded to my conversation with Eric, but Eric could not see those replies. This make sense if you know how the system works—only comments from bridged users are bridged—but it’s hardly ideal, and can lead to asymmetrical conversations. Unfortunately, the opt-in nature of the bridging service makes this inevitable.
If you are already using Bridgy Fed, how is it working out for you?
I guess my private server and open source appview conntected to the ATprotocol are a conspiracy theory then?
Yes the vast majority of people are on the main instance, but the protocol and software are decentralised. And bluesky the PBC is actually providing grants for people to set up alternative servers to speed up the decentralisation process.
Bluesky is far from perfect but I’ve been quite disappointed by the “Fedi Good bluesky bad” oversimplifying and villification that has been going on here recently.
You are still using the bluesky relay to connect to the network, right?
Have they opened up federation to support other relays yet?
yeah, it also dissapoints me. They fail to see what makes one more popular than other.
No, but they exist at the whim of Bluesky. Having multiple endpoints on your network doesn’t make it decentralized, if every endpoint is controlled by a single entity. This is an important distinction, because Bluesky can prevent a specific instance from interacting with the entire ATProto network, something which is not possible on ActivityPub, as there is no such authority who can completely shut down anybody else’s instance.