An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their posts, and like, reply and repost them.
Those same people will be able to see the others’ posts in return, too.
The technology making this possible is Bridgy Fed, one of the efforts aimed at connecting the fediverse with the web, Bluesky and, perhaps later, other networks like Nostr.
Since the 2022 sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, who rebranded the app X, there’s been a surge of interest in decentralized social media. Apps like Mastodon gained a following in the wake of Twitter’s new ownership, as users explored what a network without a centralized authority may look like. Meanwhile, Bluesky — a startup originally incubated within Twitter — raised a seed round and grew its network to over 5.7 million users after launching publicly earlier this year.
Other decentralized social media networks are finding footing of their own, too, like the blockchain-based Farcaster, which just last month closed on $150 million in funding from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, USV and others.
There’s just one problem these networks face in gaining traction against a rival like X or Meta’s Threads: Their users couldn’t talk to each other.
Though both Mastodon and Bluesky are decentralized social media efforts, they rely on different underlying protocols. That means a Mastodon user can interact with others who post elsewhere on the fediverse — that is, other apps that use the older ActivityPub social networking protocol. But they couldn’t interact with people who posted on Bluesky, because it uses the newer AT Protocol to operate.
Software developer Ryan Barrett has been working to address this problem with Bridgy Fed, a social networking bridge that would connect fediverse users to those on Bluesky and vice versa.
FYI this article is from June 2024
I thought for a second if they had finally made Bluesky opt-out. Sadly it looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer for that. :)
Just FYI, this is an old article.
There is some interesting tools that have come out because of this:
From my experience, its been very hard to find people that use the bridge both from bluesky and mastodon. But it does work. Im still looking for a browser extension that makes the process of following a bluesky account from mastodon easier. Its not very user friendly ATM.
It was new to me, and hadn’t seen it posted here - sorry if the language in the headline is misleading. Thanks for the links! I just started researching this after working with some Wordpress -> ActivityPub plugins and was curious if the functionality could extend to BlueSky.
Its all good! Lemmy isnt going to downvote you to hell for repeating something a year old. We are not reddit ;)
How does the wordpress integration work? I haven’t seen much articles talking about it lately. Can I post from mastodon to a wordpress?
We are not reddit
That’s why I’m here ;)
Here’s an article on the integration that goes into decent detail. And here’s the git repo, but you should be able to see via your plugin interface. The developer is very responsive and a great guy.
What I’ve found is that it does enable crossposting, and is a good tool for publishing your content out. Comments do come in if enabled. Subscribing to offsite Mastodon users is very “interesting” however - like being able to see people’s DMs if they’re across servers. There’s also issues with using it with cheaper hosts (Bluehost, I’m looking at you), as certain security settings will disable part or all of the feed.
To me, it feels good to use if your WP has one user publishing content. If you have other users on the site, it could start getting messy on the backend. Incoming spam is also an issue - Jetpack isn’t set up to scan incoming Fediverse content.
One can post from WordPress to ActivityPub, which could lead to blog posts ending up in Mastodon feeds. Mastodon users can then share, like, and comment.
You cannot, however, make blog posts to WordPress using ActivityPub. It’s for distribution only, like an interactive RSS feed.
In my defense, your honor, I too was misled by the headline, and coupled with my own ignorance, truly thought this was shiny and new.
I throw myself upon the mercy of the court.
As a computer engineering student who has just got into this whole fediverse thing recently I find the concept of decentralised social media to be pretty mesmerizing. I didn’t think people would actually seek the ability to cross-communicate too.
I’m only speaking for myself but I’m not sure I’d want my BlueSky and Mastodon feeds mixing. I tried it with Skybridge and a third party Mastodon app and the vibe shift felt weird. I’m all for people making bridges for those who want it but I don’t mind having two apps that I use to follow two different cultures.
On Mastodon, I followed a lot of developers and activists and it’s usually kind of serious discussions. On BlueSky, I followed shitposters and people who don’t take posting too seriously. Twitter refugees. People like that. And that works great for me. Sometimes, I want one and sometimes I want the other.
Back in the olden days when Twitter wasn’t fash, I made lists and that worked fine. Like, I had a list for activists, a list for weather alerts, local government announcements, etc. My main feed was for people making jokes. So, it can be one app. But I’ll be ok if it’s two apps. (It’d be nice to have a Tweetdeck thing — there’s blue.deck and Mastodon equivalents — that can view it all, especially during major events.)
Personally, I think a sweet spot would be to ask users when they sign up what kind of experience they want. Let them decide and make it easy to change later.
“Do you want your posts to be followed by Mastodon/Fediverse?” Yes/No/I dunno (No/I dunno are the same with a bit more info). Something like that. Then if they have it on, have a button like mastodon that makes it easy to follow outside the network.
The current way of having both accounts follow a certain account is difficult enough that most dont do it.
I wonder if you could do it like the aggregation apps that used to exist for like…FB, Twitter, Instagram, where you can access/post from multiple accounts. My big thing is I hate having a dozen apps that do the same thing; so having an aggregator app is nice. For people who want the singular account, you could see both Bsky and Mastodon. For people like yourself, you could log in to both accounts and have separate feeds, just homed on the same app. And I imagine it’d be nicer, because Activity Pub would be the base, and it could display different UIs based on what information is being pulled, so it isn’t just like a Twitter feed on FB. You could get the Lemmy view on Lemmy, Twitter view on Bsky/Mastodon, Instagram on PixelFed, etc.
