Bridgy Fed, which is working to connect the social network Bluesky with the wider fediverse (i.e., the open social web), which includes sites like Mastodon and others, will be the first app incubated within a new nonprofit called A New Social. The organization, announced Tuesday, aims to bring together developers, researchers, startups, and industry leaders building infrastructure for the open social web, including those adopting protocols like Bluesky’s AT Protocol and ActivityPub, which powers Mastodon, Meta’s Threads, and the rest of the fediverse.
Fun fact: If you use software that support following people like MBin, you can bridge your account too and follow BlueSky folk
Ah yes, Threads, a great example of the open web!
You can always choose an instance that defederates Threads, that the beauty of the open web
Doesn’t make threads itself any more open. If the only thing that matters to be “open” is the individual’s ability to block content from them why not “federate” with twitter?
You say that like I don’t want to federate with twitter, and then choose who I block.
Because let’s face it, 95% of the profiles ARE on twitter. Not everybody who uses social media gives one shit about open source. I’d say most on mastodon DO, but I’d say the vast majority on bluesky DON’T.
This will help you understand why bluesky has 24.5 active million users, and mastodon has 1.5 million active users.
Twitters new reputation is a rightwing hellhole. THAT’S why they’re bleeding users. Bluesky is exactly like twitter in functionality, but left wing leaning.
Mastodon isn’t political by nature, but functions very differently. The people who care about open source, and decentralized, and all these other things, those people signed up for mastodon. Everybody else who didn’t care, didn’t.
Now to be fair, mastodon has 10 million registered users, but only 1.5 active users. Compare that to blueskys 25 million users, with 24.5 active users.
Given mastodon’s older age compared to bluesky, it suggests to me that at some point in the past, people signed up for mastodon as an alternative to twitter…and by large have left the platform.
My speculation is that it probably happened when must bought twitter 2 years ago. Before bluesky became popular. Then they left when they realized mastodon works differently than twitter.
Personally I wouldn’t enjoy sorting through hundreds of twitter scam bots every day just for the sake of choice.
Then you can choose to block twitter. But don’t say that because YOU want to block twitter that EVERYONE should.
I’ve yet to meet a single person that enjoys twitter bots, but hey maybe the people running them would love to interact with the fediverse!
Threads is a great example of a company acknowledging that the open web exists and bringing content people want to places where they want to be. I’d like to be able to interact with everyone through one or two accounts, not have to maintain a Meta account, an Mbin account, a Google account, and all the rest.
You may not like it, but I believe the open web is about things like Threads being federated - individual platforms interacting freely, no matter who built them.
Threads acknowledges the fediverse like Microsoft acknowledged IRC. Their goal is to drain out the voices of all instances, since that is the only way to defeat a product not owned by a single entity. Will they accomplish it? Most likely not, but that doesn’t make them any more appealing.
I’d rather them become a not-for-profit instead of a non-profit.
Is there a meaningful difference in how they operate?
Oh neat. I’ve been aware of this for a while and I’m glad in an academic sense that it exists. I guess I would need more people that I care about who are on Bluesky.
As an academic, there are several users on Bluesky I would like to follow. Sadly very few are bridged for now. Hopefully all Bluesky accounts will be open for bridging at some point.
Another advantage is that thanks to Bridgy I can convince my partner to join Mastodon instead of Bluesky to promote her work, as the reach is the same on either platform.
Somewhat selfishly, I’d suggest she try Mbin instead. It allows her to interact with both the microblog side of the fediverse (including bridges) and the thread side, from the same interface.
She’s not interested in using any social media at all, she just wants a place to toot about her publications because it’s part of the job. So some Mastodon instance specific to her field is pretty much as good as it gets for her usecase. As an academic the domain-specific Mastodon instances are pretty great.
I like Mbin a lot though! :)
