On Bluesky and Mastodon, there is a fight over how to connect the two autonomous social networks and whether there should be a bridge at all. Even though there are mean comments on GitHub, these code disputes aren’t just for fun. They could affect how the internet works in the future.
Mastodon is the most well-known open social app right now. Mastodon grew quickly last year as people looked for an option to Elon Musk’s Twitter. It now has 8.7 million users. Then Bluesky became available to everyone last week. In just a few days, it gained 1.5 million users, taking its total to 4.8 million.
Bluesky is almost done federating its AT Protocol, which means that anyone can use the open source software to set up a server and make their own social network. Each server will be able to talk to the others, so a user will only need one account to use all of the social networks that use the protocol. Mastodon, on the other hand, uses a different system called ActivityPub, which means that Bluesky and Mastodon users can’t naturally talk to each other.
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Ryan Barrett learned this the hard way when he tried to use a bridge called Bridgy Fed to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub.
The fight reminds me of the culture of writing in the early 2000s, when people were afraid that Google would find out their deepest thoughts and feelings. These bloggers wanted their posts to be seen by everyone so that they could try to build communities with people who shared their interests on sites like LiveJournal. However, they didn’t want their private thoughts to get into the wrong hands by chance.
Barrett has nothing to do with Mastodon or Bluesky, but since the protocols are open source, any coder can add to what’s already there. As Bluesky union gets closer, some Mastodon users found out about Barrett’s project and criticized it.
Barrett wanted to make the bridge opt-out by default. This would let public Mastodon posts show up on Bluesky without the author knowing, and the same would go for Bluesky posts on Mastodon. One Bluesky user said the fight over the opt-out default was “the funniest github issue page I have ever seen.” Like any good internet argument, it started with legal threats that were not based on facts and turned into weird personal attacks.
For the past 12 years, Barrett has worked on projects like Bridgy, but he has never had such a strong reaction to his work.
Being the main figure of the fediverse hasn’t been easy the last few days, Barrett told TechCrunch. He does understand, though, why some Mastodon users are worried that their posts will appear in places they didn’t mean for them to.
Barrett said, “Many of the people there, especially those who have been there for a while, came from more traditional centralized social networks and were abused and mistreated there. So they came looking for and tried to make a space that was safer, smaller, and more controlled.” “Anything they do with their data needs their permission.”
A widespread misunderstanding about the bridge is that it would instantly connect Bluesky and Mastodon. The tech doesn’t work that way, though.
“Some people thought that as soon as the bridge went live, every post on the fediverse would be visible on Bluesky and vice versa,” Barrett said. “The bridge takes them and shoves them in both directions.” “That’s only done when someone asks to follow someone across the bridge.”
After getting some good advice in the GitHub chat, Barrett chose to make what he calls a “discoverable opt-in.” Users on both sides of the bridge will have to ask to follow accounts from the other side. After that, that user will get a one-time pop-up message asking if they want their accounts to be linked between the two networks.
Already, the most devoted supporters of Mastodon and Bluesky are acting like they are in a war for the open web with each other. But as more people use decentralized social networks, how these communities on different protocols talk to each other could shape the next big thing on the internet.
Fans of Mastodon have been wary of Bluesky from the start. Mastodon is appealing because it’s not run by a big company that needs to make its owners happy, like Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube. It’s a nonprofit. But in its early stages, Bluesky was a project at Twitter that was supported by Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter and used to be its CEO. Twitter no longer owns Bluesky; it is now its own business. Dorsey is on its board, but he has shown a lot more interest in Nostr, another decentralized system he backed.
For Mastodonians who were against the establishment, Dorsey’s participation was the first red flag. The second strike happened when Bluesky chose to make its own protocol instead of using one that was already out there, like ActivityPub. The discussion about Bridgy Fed right now is like a bad tip before strike three.
Both Mastodon and Bluesky have their own unique cultures. Mastodon is more serious, while Bluesky is more fun. Some of these differences are caused by the people who run the sites.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said on a panel last month, “The whole idea has been that this needs to have a good UX and be a good experience.” “People aren’t just interested in decentralization and vague ideas.” They’re just here to have fun.
Mastodon users, on the other hand, often join because they trust the technology behind it. Also, sometimes they believe in it so much that they find it offensive that Bluesky is making a new protocol from scratch instead of merging with ActivityPub. Evan Prodromou, who helped write ActivityPub, has said that he doesn’t like Bluesky.
Prodromou wrote on Instagram’s Threads, “The best thing that [Bluesky] can do for its users is implement ActivityPub to connect to the millions of users on the fediverse.” ActivityPub and Instagram’s Threads plan to work together in some way.
Bridgy Fed’s ideological problems are likely to keep making these federated social networks tense even as they add more link points. Meta’s Threads app will soon be able to work with ActivityPub networks like Mastodon. ActivityPub is also backed by Flipboard and Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and Tumblr. People who use Mastodon and don’t want to connect to other social networks might find these links to other platforms, especially Threads (which has 130 million daily users), more dangerous than a third-party Bluesky bridge.
Bridgy Fed is still being worked on by Barrett so that it is ready to go when Bluesky federates. Being the “main character of the fediverse” for a short time only made him care more about safety.
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Barrett said, “I really believe that content moderation needs to be at least as good for people on both sides of the bridge as it is for people who use the fediverse every day.” “This is my fault if I put it out there.”
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