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The people at Bluesky and Mastodon are fighting over how to connect the two decentralized social networks, and whether there should even be a bridge. behind the satire GitHub CommentsThese coding struggles are not trivial – in fact, they could shape the future of the Internet.
Mastodon is the most established decentralized social app ever. Last year, Mastodon grew in size as people looked for an alternative to Elon Musk’s Twitter, and now it stands 8.7 million the user. again bluesky opened to general public Last week, 1.5 million users were added in just a few days, bringing its total to 4.8 million users,
Bluesky is on the verge of federating its AT protocol, meaning anyone will be able to set up a server and create their own social network using open source software; Each individual server will be able to communicate with the others, requiring the user to have only one account on all the different social networks on the protocol. But Mastodon uses a different protocol called ActivityPub, which means Bluesky and Mastodon users can’t interact natively.
Turns out, some Mastodon users like it that way.
software developer Ryan Barrett When they planned to connect AT protocol and a bridge called ActivityPub they found it difficult to figure out bridge fade,
This conflict is reminiscent of blogging culture in the early 2000s, when people were concerned about having their inner thoughts and feelings indexed on Google. These bloggers wanted their posts to be public so they could attempt to build communities with like-minded people on platforms like LiveJournal, but they didn’t want their intimate musings to accidentally fall into the wrong hands.
Barrett has no affiliation with Mastodon or Bluesky, but since the protocols are open source, any third-party developer can build on the existing code. As the Bluesky Federation grew closer, some Mastodon users caught wind of Barrett’s project and criticized it.
Barrett planned to make Bridge opt-out by default, meaning that public Mastodon posts could appear on Bluesky without the author knowing, and vice versa. In which bluesky user called “The funniest Github issues page I’ve ever seen,” There was a heated debate over the opt-out default, which – like any good Internet argument – included baseless legal threats and devolved into bizarre personal attacks.
Barrett has worked on projects like Brizzi for the past 12 years, yet she has never experienced such an intense reaction to her work.
“Being the lead character in the Fediverse hasn’t been easy these past few days,” Barrett told TechCrunch. But he is sympathetic to the fear that some Mastodon users have about their posts appearing in places they didn’t expect.
“A lot of people there, especially people who have been there for a while, came from more traditional centralized social networks and were mistreated and abused, so they came looking and tried to create a place that Safer, smaller and more controlled,” Barrett said. “They expect consent for everything they do with their data.”
A common misconception about the bridge is that it will immediately fully integrate Bluesky and Mastodon. But technology doesn’t work like that.
Barrett said, “Some people have assumed that when the bridge is activated, every federal post will immediately appear on BlueSky, and vice versa, and the bridge actively moves them and pushes them in both directions.” ” “It only happens when someone requests to follow a person across the bridge for the first time.”
With the help of constructive feedback from the GitHub discussion, Barrett decided to create a “discoverable opt-in”. This way, users on either side of the bridge have to request to follow accounts from the other side of the bridge, and then that user will get a one-time pop-up asking if they want their accounts to be followed on both networks. Should bridges be built between them or not?
Already, the most ardent Mastodon and Bluesky evangelists are finding themselves acting like rival factions in the war for the open web. But as decentralized social networks become more popular, the way these ecosystems interact with each other over different protocols could set the stage for the next era of the Internet.
Mastodon’s followers have been suspicious of Bluesky from the beginning. As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, it is not controlled by a large corporation that needs to please its investors. But in its early stages, Bluesky was a project at Twitter, funded by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. BlueSky is now its own company, completely separate from Twitter. Even though Dorsey sits on its board, he has shown far greater interest in Nostra, another decentralized protocol he has supported.
For anti-establishment mastodons, Dorsey’s involvement was the first strike. Strike Two came about when Bluesky decided to create its own protocol instead of using an existing protocol like ActivityPub. Now, the debate over the Bridge Fed is like a false tip before strike three.
Popular culture varies between Mastodon and Bluesky, with Mastodon being more serious and Bluesky being more cheeky. Some of these differences come from the platform leaders themselves.
“The whole philosophy has been that it needs to have a good UX and a good experience,” said Bluesky’s CEO. jay graber said on one Panel Last month. “People are not in it just for decentralization and abstract ideas. “They are here to have fun and have a good time.”
On the other hand, Mastodon adopters often join the platform because they believe in its technology. And sometimes, they believe in it so strongly that they object to Bluesky (the company) creating another protocol from the beginning, instead of integrating with ActivityPub. Even ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromo has weighed in you distanced yourself For BlueSky.
“The best thing is [Bluesky] “Can implement ActivityPub for its users to connect with millions of users on Fediverse,” Prodromou wrote On Instagram’s threads, who is planning to support some kind of Difference With ActivityPub.
The ideological issues surrounding Bridging Fed are likely to continue to cause tension in these federated social networks as they increase their connection points. Meta plans to have a Threads app soon inter-driven With ActivityPub networks like Mastodon. WordPress.com and Tumblr owner Flipboard and Automattic are also betting on ActivityPub. For Mastodon users who want to stay away from traditional social networks, these connections are to other platforms – particularly threads, including 130 million Active users – third parties may pose an even greater threat than Bluesky Bridge.
For now, Barrett is still working on the bridge fade so that it will be ready to go when Bluesky is fed. If anything, his brief tenure as “Chief of the Union” reinforced his focus on security.
Barrett said, “I’m thinking and feeling deeply that content moderation works on both sides of the bridge, but it needs to be at least as good as it is for native federal users, and vice versa. ” “If I keep it here I’ll be in trouble.”
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