It’s time for a special holiday Bridgy Fed status update!

Since last time, we’ve been working mostly on getting A New Social off the ground and on Bridgy Fed internals. Specifically, my development focus for a while now has been cost cutting. I fund Bridgy Fed myself right now, which I’m happy to do, but it costs more to run than it should, probably by 2-3x or so.

(We do plan to fundraise for A New Social eventually and fund Bridgy Fed there instead! Including individual donations, among other sources. Stay tuned for more news when we have it.)

In the meantime, I’ve been pushing the optimization boulder uphill, making slow progress. I’m currently struggling with one big issue: getting caching working in ndb, our ORM.

ndb can cache both in memory and in memcache. We configure it to do both, but it doesn’t seem to be using memcache in production, and I’m not even sure it’s caching in memory there either. If you have experience with ndb, Google Cloud Datastore, Memorystore, or related tools, please take a look and let me know if you see anything obviously wrong!

This also means that I haven’t had much time to spend on features, bug fixes, or other user-visible updates. I’m the only developer on Bridgy Fed right now, and I’m only part time. I’d love help! It’s entirely open source, so if you’re interested, check out the open issues, feel free to dive in, and ping me on GitHub if you have any questions!

Having said that, I have done a bit besides cost cutting since last time:

• Generate link previews (aka embeds) on Bluesky.
• Launch Threads support! Just via normal ActivityPub, nothing special, but I worked with them a fair amount on interop.
• Improve sign-up flow for web => Bluesky bridging.
• Try harder to redirect fediverse @-mentions of bridged users to their web site or Bluesky profile.
• Reduce confusion on the home page sign-up form by detecting web sites that are already fediverse instances.
• Let fediverse accounts re-enable the bridge even if they disabled it before October.
• Improve interop with Friendica, Hubzilla, Misskey/Sharkey, Sharkey, WordPress Friends plugin, and GoToSocial.
• Improve authorization to prevent a cache poisoning attack.
• Improve DNS scaling for Bluesky handles.
• Populate the discoverable and indexable flags on bridged ActivityPub actors.
• Misc bug fixes for web sites on www subdomains.
• Fix rare bug where we occasionally missed bridging posts or other interactions to Bluesky.
• Fix rare bug where we occasionally missed bridging deletes.
• Continued debugging of accounts bridged into Bluesky that occasionally get stuck and stop bridging.
• Lots of docs improvements.

As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports. You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!

Excited to announce that I’m teaming up with Anuj Ahooja on a new non-profit for the open social web, across protocols, with Bridgy Fed as its first main project! Introducing A New Social.

When I posted Possible futures for Bridgy Fed a while back, I was surprised and gratified by the outpouring of support. So many of you really believe in it and want it to survive, grow, and find a stable footing beyond the useful little one-person side project it is today.

Some people stepped up even further and said, “I’m willing to put the work in and actually help build, drive, and even lead this.” Anuj is one of those people. He’s a renaissance man who’s worked on the fediverse and open social web for many years at sub.club, Flipboard, and more. He’s written at length about the potential he sees in the open social web, across all sorts of networks – “people, not platforms!” – and how we have an opportunity now that we haven’t had in a long time.

And there are so many more of you, across the space, who’ve joined and committed to supporting us! We’re truly humbled and grateful. We’re still only at the very beginning, we have a lot of work to do, but we’re excited to get started. Wish us luck, and please reach out if you want to get involved!

Congratulations to the Threads team on launching fediverse follows! Big step for the open social web.

Among other things, this means that you can now bridge your Threads account into Bluesky by following @bsky.brid.gy, and your Bluesky account into Threads by following @ap.brid.gy. Exciting!

@tchambers @mackuba @markdarb @mmasnick @mike @hallenbeck @evan @thenexusofprivacy @jaz @chrismessina @bnewbold

Wrote this up: https://snarfed.org/2024-11-01_53932

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!

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!