The bridge has been built and the switch has been turned on! Even though there was a lot of struggle and strife, arguments, and knockdown-drag-outs, @snarfed.org, AKA Ryan Barrett persevered by taking into account everyone’s opinions on what a cross-fediverse bridge between the ActivityPub powered landscape dominated by Mastodon and the ATProto protocol that powers BlueSky. It’s important to many people including myself that all networks in what I call the Open Social Media Services (OpenSNS) collection of decentralized federated networks be able to talk and interact with each other; else we might as well just go on creating big-ass tech silos that eventually will wall people off based on pre-existing factors like ethnicity, geography, culture at best and/or consolidate power to just one group of people or companies at worse. But I’ve talked ad-nauseam about this in other postings already; it’s time to talk about how this thing works!
1️⃣ Getting ready to cross
Whether you’re coming from ActivityPub/Mastodon and friends or ATProto/Bluesky, the first part is the same: You need to follow the bot that will register your OpenSNS username with Bridgy’s servers. This will count as an intent on your part that you wish your posts to be popped over to the other side.
- For 🐘 ActivityPub accounts interacting with 🦋 ATProto, follow
@bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gyandyour bridged ATproto username is
@[username.server.tld].bsky.brid.gy - For ATProto accounts interacting with 🐘 ActivityPub, follow
@ap.brid.gyand your bridged ActivityPub username is@[username]@bsky.brid.gy
🚧 At some point there’s going to be a message that will also let you know you’ve done this right after you registered sent to your existing account in the form of a unlisted message, but for now just head over to your new user page manually:
🐘 for ActivityPub users, your bridged user page is
https://fed.brid.gy/ap/@[username]@[server name].[tld]- 🦋 for ATProto users, your bridged user page can be found at
https://fed.brid.gy/bsky/[username]
There, you can even add followers and check logs to see if something isn’t working properly with syncing.
2️⃣ Let’s hop across the bridge
At this point things should be up and running and you really don’t have to do much; the system will poll somewhere between every 5~10 minutes looking for new posts to translate to the other side from you. Of course it’s in early beta right now, so it’s polling whenever Ryan gets around to it while he makes changes and works out the kinks. I recommend having an account on your target SNS site just so you can see the output and make sure it shows up correctly. There’s also a handy RSS output in your Bridgy userpage that you can subscribe to and keep track of things as well.
It’s a simple bridge really– you post in one place and it translates and posts it in the other place. If you get activity on that post in the other place, it rolls back to you wherever you are.
3️⃣ Following across the bridge
If you want to follow someone else in the other place, you need to know how their username translates just as in 1️⃣ above. Here’s some examples:
- You’re a Mastodon user wanting to follow my Bluesky account
@https://starrwulfe.xyz/about.xyz, then you need to search for@https://starrwulfe.xyz/about.xyz@bsky.brid.gyin your user search engine on Mastodon or in the app, just you’d do for a normal user. - You’re a Bluesky user wanting to follow my Mastodon account
@https://starrwulfe.xyz/about@social.vivaldi.net, then you need to search for@https://starrwulfe.xyz/about.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gyin the Bluesky users search field.
There’s a bit more to it, so please read the docs to get a good understanding:
4️⃣ Construction Notices
This is a very early beta. I outlined the core feature set, but there are some such as more interactive onboarding and opt-in notices that aren’t in production yet. Also polling is being done manually by Ryan as he works out kinks in the program and scales things up. Expect lots of changes in the next few weeks as use cases roll in and traffic is shaped. You can be a part of the process though by filing issue comments on the Github for the project:
5️⃣ Enjoy the scenery!
I’d like to thank Ryan for taking the time out of his… well life really. Bridgy has been a free service he’s operated to enable the crossposting across different social media and blogs since 2017. This blog is half powered by it whenever someone comments via Bluesky and Mastodon! He charges $0 and while he insists it’s a negligible cost to keep the infrastructure up, his rapid response to problems and ability to chat about how it works anytime has gotta be a serious time weight, passion project or not. This endeavor is very much appreciated and highly valued by me and lots more, I’m sure. 🙇🏾♂️
Also, be sure to catch his Flipboard/Dot Social interview if you’d like to know more about the project and the rollercoaster ride around it.
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