Good Morning Folks! I guess I will probably keep giving health updates at the start of posts for a bit. So far there isn’t a lot of change from yesterday. I think maybe having chunks of my vision occluded periodically by floaters is just my new normal. Most of the time I can get used to it but then every so often something moves around in there and it feels like I am losing my mind. Anyway, I am stable and thankfully my right eye continues to function normally. This morning I thought I would tackle a topic that I have been poking around with for a while… and that is using a third-party bridge to connect my Fediverse account to BlueSky and my BlueSky to the Fediverse. This is not as straightforward as I would have hoped, but I am going to talk about how this has worked so far.
In the great social media shakeup of 2022 I wound up in a position where I only really care about two networks. The vast majority of people that I want to keep in touch with exist on either the Fediverse aka Mastodon or on BlueSky. Both of these are platforms that claim to be federated, with Mastodon being more open and wild west about this statement and BlueSky being more proprietary and authoritarian about their implementation of this concept. The dream is simple… I want to be able to use my Gamepad.club account which is the one that feels most like home to me, and talk to all of my friends over on BlueSky without really needing to ever log into that client. I “live” in the Fediverse and that is my home now, but I still want the ability to keep a foot in the other domain… but in a perfect world, I would be able to never actually leave my home to see those folks.
While the perfect scenario of ActivityPub and the AT protocol just working together seamlessly does not exist, various sites that act as a bridge between the two networks do. The idea is pretty straightforward, if you have an account on the Fediverse you can follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy and it will create a faux account for you over on Bluesky. For example the BlueSky account that copies all public content from my Mastodon account is @belghast.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy following a predictable pattern based on what your handle and instance name is. The other direction works similarly and if you are primarily on BlueSky and want folks on the Fediverse to be able to follow you then you would follow @ap.brid.gy and all of your public posts on BlueSky will flow to the other network. Similarly, my BlueSky Account copied over to the Fediverse can be found at @belghast.com@bsky.brid.gy which does not have a proper Fediverse profile and just links directly to BlueSky instead.
This is without a doubt an imperfect solution. The first problem is that the average length of a Fediverse post is MUCH longer than BlueSky currently allows. So even when I am trying to be brief with my thoughts, the end result when it transfers across the wire ends up getting truncated more often than not. The post ends up awkwardly linking back to my Gamepad.Club post so that someone can view the rest of it… feeling very unnatural. Like I said above this also only works with “public” posts, so I pretty regularly limit my visibility on Mastodon to “Followers Only” which allows me to post things without spamming my local server feed. These will not translate across the bridge because they are not fully public posts, and similarly, I don’t think this works at all for accounts that are set to private on either side of the connection.
So while a very imperfect solution… it is still better than nothing. Will it ever live up to my dream of being able to have full connectivity to my friends on both sides of this federation protocol divide? Probably not if simply because it requires someone to take action on either network to allow themselves to be “findable”. Following an account does not seem like a lot, but it is enough friction to keep a lot of folks from ever doing it because it is not the default state of the network. This is an opinion informed by years of watching folks use the default client for Twitter despite it being full of advertisements, having a mangled timeline, and not having half of the features that the third-party ones did. The default state is as much as most folks will ever interact with these social networks, and as much as I would love to have my BlueSky friend discoverable from my home account on Gamepad.club, I figure it will only be a handful of edge cases that ever adopt this technology.
Hopefully, this demystifies the process a bit. It really is as simple as following either the Mastodon account if you want to bridge to Bluesky, or the Bluesky account if you want to bridge to Mastodon. I will warn you however that it takes a few days for things to really get up and running properly. Give it time and before long your posts will start beaming over to the other network within a few minutes of originally posting it. If you have any questions feel free to ping me as I am still regularly checking both networks.