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
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
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.
