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Bluesky and Mastodon users are fighting over how to connect the two decentralized social networks and whether there should even be a bridge. Behind the sarcastic Comments on GitHubThese coding conflicts aren’t frivolous: in fact, they could shape the future of the Internet.
Mastodon is the most established decentralized social application to date. Last year, Mastodon gained momentum as people looked for an alternative to Elon Musk’s Twitter. 8.7 million users. Then Blue Sky open to the general public last week, adding 1.5 million users in just a few days and bringing its total to 4.8 million users.
Bluesky is set to federate its AT protocol, meaning anyone will be able to create a server and create their own social network using the open source software; each individual server will be able to communicate with others, which will require a user to have only one account on all of the protocol’s different social networks. But Mastodon uses a different protocol called ActivityPub, which means Bluesky and Mastodon users cannot interact natively.
Turns out some Mastodon users like it that way.
Software developer Ryan Barrett found this out the hard way when he decided to connect the AT protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Brigitte Fed.
The conflict dates back to the blogging culture of the early 2000s, when people worried about having their innermost thoughts and feelings indexed on Google. These bloggers wanted their posts to be public, so they could try to form communities with like-minded people on platforms like LiveJournal, but they didn’t want their intimate musings to accidentally fall into the wrong hands.
Barrett has no affiliation with Mastodon or Bluesky, but because the protocols are open source, any third-party developer can build on existing code. As the Bluesky Federation grew closer, some Mastodon users caught wind of Barrett’s plan and went on a rampage.
Barrett planned to disable the bridge by default, meaning that Mastodon’s public posts could appear on Bluesky without the author’s knowledge, and vice versa. In which Bluesky user called “The funniest Github issues page I’ve ever seen”, there was a heated debate about the opt-out default, which – like any good argument on the Internet – included unfounded legal threats and escalated into d ‘strange personal attacks.
Barrett has worked on projects like Bridgy for the past 12 years, but he’s never felt such an intense reaction to his work.
“It hasn’t been easy the last few days being the main character in the fediverse,” Barrett told TechCrunch. But he understands the fear some Mastodon users have of seeing their posts appear in places they didn’t expect.
“A lot of people there, especially those who have been there for a while, came from more traditional centralized social networks and were abused and abused there. So they came looking and tried to create a safer, smaller, friendlier space. more controlled,” Barrett said. “They expect consent for everything they do with their data.”
A common misconception about the deck is that it would immediately and fully integrate Bluesky and Mastodon. But that’s not how technology works.
“Some people assumed that when the bridge went live, all federal messages would be immediately visible on Bluesky, and vice versa, and that the bridge would proactively take them and push them back and forth,” Barrett said. “He only does it when someone first asks to follow a person across the bridge.”
With the help of constructive feedback from the GitHub discussion, Barrett decided to create what he calls a “discoverable opt-in.” This way, users on either side of the bridge must request to follow the accounts on the other side of the bridge, then that user will receive a single pop-up asking if they want their accounts linked between the two networks or not .
Already, the most ardent Mastodon and Bluesky evangelists find themselves acting like rival factions in a war for the open web. But as decentralized social networks become more popular, the way these ecosystems on different protocols interact with each other could pave the way for the next era of the Internet.
Mastodon followers have been skeptical of Bluesky from the start. As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram, Twitter or YouTube, it is not controlled by a large corporation that needs to make its investors happy. But in its early days, Bluesky was a project on Twitter, funded by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Bluesky is now its own company, completely separate from Twitter. Although Dorsey sits on its board, he has shown much more interest in Nostr, another decentralized protocol that he has supported.
For the protest behemoths, Dorsey’s involvement was a first blow. The second strike came when Bluesky decided to create its own protocol instead of using an existing one, like ActivityPub. Today, the Bridgy Fed debate seems like a bad tip before the third strike.
The dominant culture is different between Mastodon and Bluesky, with Mastodon being more serious and Bluesky being more cheeky. Some of these differences come from the platform leaders themselves.
“The whole philosophy has been that it has to have good UX and be a good experience,” CEO of Bluesky. Jay Graber said on a sign last month. “People are not only interested in decentralization and abstract ideas. They are here to have fun and have a good time here.
On the other hand, Mastodon adoptees often join the platform because they believe in its technology. And sometimes they believe in it so much that they get offended that Bluesky (the company) is building a whole other protocol from scratch, rather than integrating it with ActivityPub. Even ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou expressed his you walked away for Blue Sky.
“The best thing that [Bluesky] can do for its users is to implement ActivityPub to connect to the millions of fediverse users”, Prodromou wrote on Instagram threads, which plans to support some form of interoperability with ActivityPub.
The ideological issues around Bridgy Fed will likely continue to fuel tensions within these federated social networks as they increase their connection points. Soon, Meta’s Threads app plans to become interoperable with ActivityPub networks like Mastodon. Flipboard and Automattic, owner of WordPress.com and Tumblr, are also banking on ActivityPub. For Mastodon users who want to stay isolated from traditional social networks, these connections to other platforms, including Threads, which have 130 million active users – could pose a bigger threat than a third-party Bluesky bridge.
For now, Barrett is still working on Bridgy Fed so it will be ready to go when Bluesky federates. If anything, his brief stint as the “main character of the fediverse” reinforced his emphasis on security.
“I think and feel deeply that however content moderation works on both sides of the bridge, it needs to be at least as good as it is for native fediverse users, and vice versa,” Barrett said. “I’m responsible if I post this here.”
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