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
Oh neat. I’ve been aware of this for a while and I’m glad in an academic sense that it exists. I guess I would need more people that I care about who are on Bluesky.
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.
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! :)
Ah yes, Threads, a great example of the open web!
You can always choose an instance that defederates Threads, that the beauty of the open web
Doesn’t make threads itself any more open. If the only thing that matters to be “open” is the individual’s ability to block content from them why not “federate” with twitter?
I mean that’s not the only thing, I can follow this MBin account that I’m using to talk with you from Threads, and I can interact with Threads posts as well, I’ve even gotten likes from there
Something like that is impossible with Twitter, altho I wouldn’t be fully against the idea to reconnect with a few people I know who refused to leave it for whatever reason
Also, look at the bright side, people that use Threads at least don’t use Twitter, I think it’s a small step in the right direction, no?
Also, look at the bright side, people that use Threads at least don’t use Twitter, I think it’s a small step in the right direction, no?
Depends on why you dislike twitter.
Threads is a great example of a company acknowledging that the open web exists and bringing content people want to places where they want to be. I’d like to be able to interact with everyone through one or two accounts, not have to maintain a Meta account, an Mbin account, a Google account, and all the rest.
You may not like it, but I believe the open web is about things like Threads being federated - individual platforms interacting freely, no matter who built them.
Yeah. Peoples concerns around Meta and EEE notwithstanding, ActivityPub is an open standard maintained by the W3C. It’s meant to be used by anyone and everyone, just like HTTP is. The desire is to give options that esshew social silos, not to create social wilderness outside of the corporate city states
Had a typo in there. It’s eschew
Threads acknowledges the fediverse like Microsoft acknowledged IRC. Their goal is to drain out the voices of all instances, since that is the only way to defeat a product not owned by a single entity. Will they accomplish it? Most likely not, but that doesn’t make them any more appealing.
I don’t remember MSN Messenger being able to handle IRC chats. If it had, I wouldn’t have needed an IRC client. But Threads won’t drown out other voices, they’ll just add voices to the conversation. There’s content on Threads that’s worth following, and I don’t think it’s valuable to lose that because of a few engagement farms that you can either personally block or defederate.
Threads is, in my experience, a poor user experience. Lots of engagement farming and repeated posts, and bots.
Hasn’t been my experience, but I’m mostly in a sphere of scientists, creatives, and memes. A couple art museums post some great stuff too.
Mostly leftists for me, I seem to get loads of “suggested for you” as well.
Most social media has a leftward bias. Avoiding politics in any form of social media now is like trying to avoid plankton in ocean water - you might be able to do it, but you’ll need a really tight filter.
What I see is more bots, and cross posting ads made easy 🥲
To be fair there’s a lot of ad spam bots that I see on Mastodon as it is… I see better moderation tools as a solution, not being a walled garden
Exactly
