This is a big step toward making the “fediverse,” which is the larger network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, and others, work better together. It’s now easy for people who use decentralized apps like Bluesky’s AT Protocol-powered Mastodon to follow people on other networks and see their posts. They can also like, reply to, and share them.
The same people will also be able to see the posts of the other people.
Bridgy Fed is the technology that makes this possible. It is one of the projects that aims to connect the fediverse to the web, Bluesky, and maybe even other networks like Nostr in the future.
A lot of people are interested in decentralized social media now that Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and changed the name of the app to X. People became interested in apps like Mastodon after Twitter changed hands because they let people try out a network without a central authority. Bluesky, a company that started out as an incubator within Twitter, raised a seed round and now has over 5.7 million users after going public earlier this year.
Other decentralized social media networks are also getting off the ground. For example, the blockchain-based Farcaster raised $150 million from investors such as Paradigm, a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, USV, and others just last month.
One thing that makes it hard for these networks to compete with X or Meta’s Threads is that their users couldn’t talk to each other.
Mastodon and Bluesky are both decentralized social networks, but they use different methods to work. That means that people who use Mastodon can talk to people who post on the fediverse in other apps that use the older ActivityPub social networking system. They couldn’t talk to people who posted on Bluesky, though, because that site uses the more recent AT Protocol.
Ryan Barrett, a software worker, has been working on Bridgy Fed, a social networking bridge that would let people on Fediverse connect with people on Bluesky and Bluesky users connect with people on Fediverse.
At first, there was a lot of disagreement about the planned opt-out nature of the bridge. But Barrett listened to what the community had to say and for now made the bridge opt-in on both sides.
In the future, though, that could change so that only Bluesky users can choose not to be notified. He told, “The rules and expectations are a little different there than in the fediverse.”
Bridgy Fed soft-launched in the middle of April and has been moving toward a full launch over the past month. Bridgy is now one of many projects in the fediverse that try to connect networks. Others include Sasquatch, pinhole, RSS Parrot, mostr.pub, and SkyBridge. However, not all of them work both ways as well as Bridgy does.
How To Use Bridgy Fed
It’s pretty simple to use Bridgy Fed. For starts, it only works with public accounts and posts, so you don’t have to worry about your private or followers-only posts being shared elsewhere.
Follow the Mastodon account @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy to connect an account from the fediverse to Bluesky. It will follow you back. Bluesky users will then be able to find your new, bridged account under your fediverse/Mastodon name (with a dot where the second @ used to be), followed by “ap.brid.gy.”
In this case, my bridged account is @sarahp.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy if my Mastodon account is @sarahp@mastodon.social.
You should follow the @ap.brid.gy account on Bluesky if you want to connect your Bluesky account to the free world. In the same way, you’ll be given a linked version of your Bluesky account in the fediverse. That’s what it looks like:
My linked account is @sarahp.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy if my Bluesky account is @sarahp@bsky.social. On Mastodon, it will also be called a “automated” account to let people know it’s a linked account.
Anything from your Bluesky account that talks to fediverse users will be bridged. This includes replies, @mentions, likes, reports, and your own Bluesky posts if you have fediverse fans. It’s the same for the other way around.
To be clear, this is not the same as cross-posting, where you make a post once and software sends it to all of your linked accounts. It’s more like making a copy of your feed on a different site. You might be able to reach more people because you can talk to people on a different social network.
Both the fediverse-to-Bluesky bridge and the bluesky-to-fediverse bridge are still in early beta testing, so you may run into issues, bugs, downtime, and other issues for now.
Barrett says he has more ideas for Bridgy Fed as well, such as putting out a prompt to help people find it. “If you try to follow someone who isn’t yet bridged, you’ll get a direct message asking them to join.” “I’m waiting for Bluesky to add OAuth support for that,” he says.
Mastodon, Friendica, Misskey, PeerTube, Hubzilla, and other fediverse sites, as well as Bluesky and your own website, can use the bridge right now. Later, it plans to add support for Nostr to its bridge as well. Nostr is a decentralized social service that Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and former CEO, now likes.
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