Hi all! It’s been a while since my last status update on Bridgy Fed, its upcoming Bluesky/AT Protocol support, and the resulting blowup.

It’s coming along! It’s not launched yet, I still have a number of things to build and tests to run, but it’s getting there. Maybe more importantly, Bluesky’s current federation test is limited to 10 users per federated server. We can’t launch until they lift that limit. I don’t know when that will happen, but I’m confident it will.

I’m also blocking launch on building the opt in/out prompt idea that came out of the blowup. Thank you all for that idea, I really do appreciate it. The current design is that a Bridgy Fed instance actor (user) will DM you the first time anyone on Bluesky requests to follow or interact with you over the bridge. If you reply yes, or follow the Bridgy Fed user, you’ll be bridged. If you reply no, or ignore the DM, or block that user, you won’t be. You’ll also be able to follow or block them to opt in or out proactively, ahead of time.

On a related note, I still think there’s a tension between the fediverse’s current default of open, opt-out federation and its culture of consent and opt-in otherwise. That tension is magnified by the fact that the fediverse has always been multi-protocol, not just ActivityPub but also OStatus, Diaspora, and Zot/Nomad, among others, so boundaries between networks have been fuzzy at best.

For people who want it, consent-based/opt-in federation is the most promising solution that I’ve heard so far. Beyond that, I don’t have any answers of my own, but there’s obviously been lots of discussion over the last couple months, which feels like a good sign.

As always, feedback is welcome!

Hi all! Well, I didn’t plan it, but word got out anyway: Bridgy Fed‘s Bluesky <=> fediverse support went online a couple weeks ago, quietly and without announcement, but people still found it. Over 1200 accounts have turned it on so far and bridged themselves one direction or the other. It’s great to see so much early interest!

(For anyone unfamiliar with Bridgy Fed, here’s an introduction.)

It’s still very early, and I wasn’t quite prepared for this much volume this quickly. Expect lots of bugs, missing features, downtime, and other rough edges. The docs are mostly up to date, at least. If you hit a problem, search the open issues, and if you don’t see it there, feel free to file it.

Also, much of the current state is not final. Expect some design and policy choices to change. For example, right now you have to manually enable the bridge, but that may change eventually, at least for Bluesky accounts bridging into the fediverse.

Otherwise, there’s a ton to do, and I’m only one person, doing this on the side, so progress will be slow. They say if you don’t feel uncomfortable when you ship, you probably waited too long, so let me just say that I feel very uncomfortable right now, hopefully in a good way. Thanks again for all the interest, and for your patience!

Bridgy Fed status update time! It’s been a busy couple weeks. I’m happy to report that I’ve made solid progress on three of my four goals from last time – reliability, delays, and bugs – and improved a number of other things along the way. Here’s a sampling:

• Switched Bluesky => fediverse from polling to firehose. This made it way less flaky, and cut the 5-15m delay down to just seconds.
• Fixed fediverse => Bluesky getting stuck for many accounts. I took some shortcuts in my Bluesky infrastructure, and they came back to bite me. Still work left to do, but the user-visible issues should be largely fixed.
• Various issues with finding the bot accounts, following them, and getting bridging started.
• Fixed images in Bluesky => fediverse posts.
• Implemented deleting posts, Bluesky => fediverse. (Fediverse => Bluesky was already working.)
• Fixed flakiness bridging replies, both directions.
• Fixed links, mentions, and hashtags, both directions. Still some broken bits here, notably Bluesky => fediverse mentions, but otherwise these should be much better now.
• First pass at spam filtering. Sigh.

Apart from the firehose, one notable area I haven’t focused on yet is infrastructure. It’s scaling ok so far, but it could be a lot better, and a lot more efficient. I’ll need to work on that soon. If you see a bit of time go by without many user-visible improvements, that’s probably what’s happening.

Otherwise, thanks for all the feedback and questions and bug reports! Please do keep them coming. As always, you can follow the now label in GitHub to see what I’m focusing on. See you on the bridge!