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
Ah yes, Threads, a great example of the open web!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
