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
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.
THIS is what I keep telling people. The fediverse will win in the end as long as it bridges out to everyone. Because eventually the centralized services will die, or lose popularity. Myspace is dead. HotOrNot is dead. Digg is dead. Friendster is dead. Facebook is dying. YahooIM is dead. AOLIM/AIM is dead. ICQ is dead. MSN Messanger is dead.
All these communication services died because they were centrally supported. But if MissKey dies, the fediverse doesn’t die. The MissKey users just migrate to a new service.
Now if twitter, and threads, and facebook, and reddit, and instagram, and all these other services integrate with the fediverse, the fediverse benefits. And if meta dies in 2042, that’s fine. Threads will go away, and facebook, and whatsapp, and instagram will all go away. But the users will say “Now, I heard about pixelfed. Instagram is gone, lets just go to pixelfed.”
Whereas HotOrNot users didn’t have a fediverse they COULD federate with. So back then, the website just died, and nobody’s heard of that concept for a website. There was no replacement. The userbase just ceased to exist.
The pillars for centralized services will fall in time with or without the fediverse. But WITH the fediverse connected before they fall, you implant the suggestion that there IS more out there to an audience that otherwise had no idea the fediverse existed.
Only reason I know of Lemmy/the fediverse is because I got autobanned from reddit. I went out of my way to search for a reddit replacement. Prior to that, I had no idea the fediverse existed. I think I vaguely heard of mastodon…but had no idea it was connected to a bigger network.
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! :)