You and @quillmatiq may also have common ground on bridges, he's been thinking about them too, and he might post more soon. Looking forward to that.
People regularly ask me whether Bridgy Fed is ready to scale and support more users. It’s a technical question, but their underlying motivation is usually broader: they believe in the social web, and the fediverse(s), and they want them to connect everyone who’s willing, across instances and networks and protocols.
Right now, the answer is, I don’t know. It’s not a technical thing; as an engineer, that part is catnip for me. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and dive in. The more difficult part is organizational. Right now, Bridgy Fed is effectively one person’s side project. I love building and running (and funding!) it, and I have no plans to change that. However, it has basically no organization, governance, or institutional structure. It’s just me.
That’s ok! At least, as long as it continues to be one person’s side project. It’s growing, though, and people are starting to envision it, and bridges in general, as more important parts of the decentralized social web. Load bearing infrastructure.
Stable, reliable infrastructure is hugely valuable. To do it right, you need stable, reliable organizational structure. You need people to dedicate their time and expertise, sustainably. You need funding, and institutional governance, and some amount of transparency.
Right now, Bridgy Fed mostly doesn’t have those things. It’s one person’s side project.
That could change! I’m open to it. I don’t plan to lead that change myself, though. I’ve enjoyed building it in my spare time for many years now, and I have no plans to stop any time soon. It is not my career, though, or my calling, or my life’s work. I’ve spent my last 10+ years in leadership, I’m comfortable with it, but this isn’t where I’m personally looking to do it. For me, Bridgy Fed just a fun, hopefully useful side project. I’ve been between gigs for a bit now, spending a lot of time on it, but that won’t last forever. I expect to take a real job again eventually, and when that happens, I’ll have way less of that time.
So, to anyone hoping Bridgy Fed will become core infrastructure for the social web: that is one possible future! The first thing we’d need is an executive director or CEO, someone who wants to lead its organization, product, and policy. Someone who’d build relationships with groups like IFTAS, the SWF, Bluesky, IndieWeb, and others. Someone who’d own fundraising, if necessary. (Funding isn’t the real problem here, though. I self fund Bridgy Fed right now, and I could expand that to help with staff and other costs.)
This wouldn’t be a full time job; I expect it would only take 5-10 hours per week. It wouldn’t necessarily need a dedicated role or standalone organization, either. Bridgy Fed could live comfortably as one of many projects inside a broader group like IFTAS or the SWF, or even a benevolent company like Flipboard or non-profit like Ghost.
Another possible future for Bridgy Fed is the glide path it’s on now: one person’s side project. I can keep running it like this for the foreseeable future. Hopefully useful and stable, but definitely not core infrastructure. No real governance or institutional structure.
In particular, as one person’s side project, Bridgy Fed would probably remain opt-in in most places. This post is not about opt-in vs opt-out, or any other big policy or product decision, but it is about who makes those decisions, and how they should be made. Regardless of how public or global or searchable a network is, or how much it encourages tools to be opt-out – like Bluesky does – making Bridgy Fed opt-out anywhere would set more of an expectation that it’s core infrastructure. As long as it’s just my side project, I can’t satisfy that expectation.
If you think Bridgy Fed needs to grow up and be real infrastructure, and you’re interested in possibly leading it as executive director, or adopting it into a bigger organization, or you know somone who might be, that’s a very possible future. Drop me a line, I’d love to talk. In the meantime, when people ask me whether it can scale, or switch to opt-out, or what the long term plan is, I now have something to point them to. Thanks for reading.
Good conversation everyone! Thanks for the support. I'm all for instances and networks making their own decisions on bridge opt-in vs opt-out too.
There's another angle here though: who should make these kinds of decisions on the tools' side, eg for Bridgy Fed itself? And beyond that, if we want to consider defaulting them more toward the opt-out, "big fedi" direction – pardon the metaphor, thanks Evan! – that starts to shift them away from fun useful side projects and more toward core social web infrastructure.
To do that right, they need real structure, organization, and governance. That's at the core of my discomfort so far with considering opt-out. We definitely could put real, grown-up structure in place around Bridgy Fed to turn it into sustainable infrastructure and support that kind of decision. But we (I) haven't yet.
I need to write this up more thoroughly; I'll do that soon. Thanks again for the thoughts so far.
Hi Bridgy Fed fans! It’s time for another status update, headlined by two big new features.
First, you can now use custom domain handles on accounts bridged into Bluesky! Web sites and fediverse accounts can both do this; click through for instructions. Here’s an example. We’ve been excited about this for a while, we hope it makes bridged accounts feel a bit more like first class citizens.
Second, if you deactivate bridging to Bluesky, you can now undo it and bring back your bridged account! Just un-block and re-follow the bot, or for a web site, file an issue or ping me. This is supported if you first deactivated after 2024-10-22; we’re still working on the rest.
I’m also excited that Tamschi has generously volunteered to help triage issues and coordinate development. He’s been a valuable presence on the project for a while now. Please give him a warm welcome!
Oh, and I got distracted for a bit and built a labeler that emits custom self-labels, then promptly realized that custom self-labels probably aren’t allowed, even though Bridgy Fed has been using them since launch. Ah well!
Lots more since last time too:
As usual, feel free to ping me with feedback, questions, and bug reports. You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what I’m currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!
I wish I had a better sense of where gravity comes from. Anyone have good intuition that they could explain?
I obviously get what it is: apple falls from the tree, etc. And I think I more or less get how it is: Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, curved spacetime, etc.
But I do not get why it is. Why does gravity exist? Why do large accumulations of mass naturally pull other mass toward them? 🧐
One theory I’ve heard is that there’s a universal field, like the Higgs, with particles traveling in all directions and colliding with mass. If you’re near a massive body like a star or planet or moon, it blocks some particles on its side from hitting you, but not from the other side, so the net effect pushes you toward it.
That would make gravity related to volume instead of mass, though, which obviously isn’t right. Still, I don’t remember hearing any other explanations. Does anyone know of any?
Fediverse account migrations aren't officially supported right now, but I'm glad to hear your first one worked!
And hachyderm.io isn't blocking Bridgy Fed afaict, I don't see any brid.gy domains on https://hachyderm.io/about in the Moderated servers section at the bottom.
Added Farcaster to my social protocols comparison table. Click through for HTML version with text, links, etc. Feedback is welcome!
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:
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!
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!
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!
