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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.
I haven’t investigated / tested it yet, but it should be possible. The thing is that Lemmy and Mastodon use different parts of the ActivityPub protocol to publish content, which is why interaction between the two is “interesting”. My guess is that you’ll be able to post and reply to comments and DMs, but it may be difficult to create posts in communities.
Side note, Mbin combines the Mastodon/Lemmy interpretation of ActivityPub protocols pretty well, so it’s possible, but when I last used it was still pretty fragile, and had stability issues. When the project was kbin, it had a real problem during the CSAM attacks on the Fediverse about two years ago, which led to the biggest instances being defederated and the founder eventually having to abandon the project.
It could work. If anyone on Bluesky wants to give it a shot I can make a post to some testing community - my profile is bridged. Not very interestingly so though, as I don’t post microblogs often.
Edit: I just made this post in Mbin, seen here in dbzer0’s Dylan community, and here on Bluesky. Spreading it everywhere certainly worked, if a bridged user wants to respond they can share their emotions after listening to this. ;)
Heck yeah I’ll give you a follow over on Bluesky. I’m following a handful of people that are bridged Mastodon users. Yours will be the first Mbin one though. I really hope all the kinks get worked out over time though because I really love the idea of interconnectivity.