An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their posts, and like, reply and repost them.
Those same people will be able to see the others’ posts in return, too.
The technology making this possible is Bridgy Fed, one of the efforts aimed at connecting the fediverse with the web, Bluesky and, perhaps later, other networks like Nostr.
Since the 2022 sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, who rebranded the app X, there’s been a surge of interest in decentralized social media. Apps like Mastodon gained a following in the wake of Twitter’s new ownership, as users explored what a network without a centralized authority may look like. Meanwhile, Bluesky — a startup originally incubated within Twitter — raised a seed round and grew its network to over 5.7 million users after launching publicly earlier this year.
Other decentralized social media networks are finding footing of their own, too, like the blockchain-based Farcaster, which just last month closed on $150 million in funding from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, USV and others.
There’s just one problem these networks face in gaining traction against a rival like X or Meta’s Threads: Their users couldn’t talk to each other.
Though both Mastodon and Bluesky are decentralized social media efforts, they rely on different underlying protocols. That means a Mastodon user can interact with others who post elsewhere on the fediverse — that is, other apps that use the older ActivityPub social networking protocol. But they couldn’t interact with people who posted on Bluesky, because it uses the newer AT Protocol to operate.
Software developer Ryan Barrett has been working to address this problem with Bridgy Fed, a social networking bridge that would connect fediverse users to those on Bluesky and vice versa.
Just FYI, this is an old article.
There is some interesting tools that have come out because of this:
From my experience, its been very hard to find people that use the bridge both from bluesky and mastodon. But it does work. Im still looking for a browser extension that makes the process of following a bluesky account from mastodon easier. Its not very user friendly ATM.
It was new to me, and hadn’t seen it posted here - sorry if the language in the headline is misleading. Thanks for the links! I just started researching this after working with some Wordpress -> ActivityPub plugins and was curious if the functionality could extend to BlueSky.
Its all good! Lemmy isnt going to downvote you to hell for repeating something a year old. We are not reddit ;)
How does the wordpress integration work? I haven’t seen much articles talking about it lately. Can I post from mastodon to a wordpress?
That’s why I’m here ;)
Here’s an article on the integration that goes into decent detail. And here’s the git repo, but you should be able to see via your plugin interface. The developer is very responsive and a great guy.
What I’ve found is that it does enable crossposting, and is a good tool for publishing your content out. Comments do come in if enabled. Subscribing to offsite Mastodon users is very “interesting” however - like being able to see people’s DMs if they’re across servers. There’s also issues with using it with cheaper hosts (Bluehost, I’m looking at you), as certain security settings will disable part or all of the feed.
To me, it feels good to use if your WP has one user publishing content. If you have other users on the site, it could start getting messy on the backend. Incoming spam is also an issue - Jetpack isn’t set up to scan incoming Fediverse content.
One can post from WordPress to ActivityPub, which could lead to blog posts ending up in Mastodon feeds. Mastodon users can then share, like, and comment.
You cannot, however, make blog posts to WordPress using ActivityPub. It’s for distribution only, like an interactive RSS feed.