The folks at Bluesky and Mastodon are fighting over how to bring the two decentralized social networks together, and whether there should be a bridge. Behind the sarcastic GitHub comment These coding conflicts are not frivolous; in fact, they could shape the future of the Internet.
Mastodon is the most established decentralized social application to date. Last year, Mastodon grew in size as people looked for an alternative to Elon Musk's Twitter, and now it is located in 8,7 million users. Bluesky then opened to the general public last week, adding 1,5 million users in a few days and bringing its total to 4,8 million users.
Bluesky is about to federate its AT protocol, meaning anyone will be able to set up a server and create their own social network using the open source software; Each individual server will be able to communicate with the others, requiring a user to have a single account on all of the protocol's different social networks. But Mastodon uses a different protocol called ActivityPub, which means Bluesky and Mastodon users can't interact natively.
Some Mastodon users like it that way.
The software developer Ryan Barrett He discovered this the hard way when he set out to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Bridgy Fed.
The conflict dates back to the blog culture of the early 2000s, when people worried about their most intimate thoughts and feelings being indexed on Google. These bloggers wanted their posts to be public, so they could try to form 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 develop existing code. As the Bluesky federation approaches, some Mastodon users caught wind of Barrett's project and lashed out.
Barrett planned to make the bridge opt-out by default, meaning that Mastodon's public posts could appear on Bluesky without the author knowing, and vice versa. As a Bluesky user has called “Funniest Github issue page I've ever seen,” there was a heated debate over the default opt-out, which, like any good argument on the internet, included unfounded legal threats and led to bizarre personal attacks.
Barrett has worked on projects like Bridgy for the past 12 years, but she has never experienced such an intense reaction to her work.
"It hasn't been easy these last few days being the main character of the fediverso," Barrett said. But understand the fear that some have Mastodon users that their Posts appear in places you didn't anticipate.
“A lot of the people, especially those who have been there for a while, came from more traditional centralized social networks and were mistreated and abused in them, so they came looking and tried to put together a space that was safer, smaller and more controlled,” Barrett said. "They expect consent for anything they do with your data."
A common misconception about the bridge is that it would immediately integrate Bluesky and Mastodon completely. But that's not how technology works.
"Some people have assumed that when the bridge goes live, immediately all the miscellaneous posts will be visible in Bluesky, and vice versa, and the bridge proactively takes them and pushes them in both directions," Barrett said. "It only does this when someone first requests to follow a person across the bridge."
With the help of constructive feedback from the GitHub discussion, Barrett decided to create what he calls a “discoverable opt-in.” That way, users on both sides of the bridge must request to follow the accounts on the other side of the bridge, and then that user will receive a unique popup asking if they want their accounts to connect between the two networks or not.
Mastodon and Bluesky's most ardent evangelists are already finding themselves acting as rival factions in a war over the open web. But as the social media As decentralized networks become more popular, the way these ecosystems on different protocols interact with each other could lay the groundwork for the next era of the Internet.
Mastodon fans have been skeptical of Bluesky from the beginning. As a nonprofit, Mastodon's appeal is that, unlike Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube, it's not controlled by a big corporation that needs to make its investors happy. But in its early stages, Bluesky was a Twitter project, funded by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Bluesky is now his own company, completely separate from Twitter. Although Dorsey sits on its board, he has proven to be much more interested in Nostr, another decentralized protocol that he backed.
For the anti-establishment mastodons, Dorsey's participation was the first blow. The second blow came when Bluesky decided to create his own protocol instead of using an existing one, like ActivityPub. Now, the Bridgy Fed debate is something of a bad warning before strike three.
The prevailing culture is different between Mastodon and Bluesky, with Mastodon being more serious and Bluesky being more cheeky. Some of these differences come from the platforms' leaders themselves.
“The whole philosophy has been that this has to have great UX and be a good social experience,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said last month. “People are not in this just for decentralization and abstract ideas. “They are there to have fun and have a good time.”
On the other hand, Mastodon followers often join the platform because they believe in its technology. And sometimes they believe in it so much that they are offended that Bluesky (the company) created a completely different protocol from scratch, instead of integrating it with ActivityPub. Even ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou has expressed his dislike with BlueSky.
“The best thing Bluesky can do for its users is implement ActivityPub to connect to the millions of users on the Internet,” wrote Prodromou on Instagram Threads, which also plans (Threads) to support some form of interoperability with ActivityPub.
Ideological issues around Bridgy Fed are likely to continue fueling tension in these federated social networks as their connection points increase. Soon, Meta's Threads app plans to be interoperable with ActivityPub networks like Mastodon. Flipboard and Automattic, owner of WordPress.com and Tumblr, are also betting on ActivityPub. For Mastodon users who want to remain isolated from traditional social networks, these connections to other platforms (particularly Threads, which has 130 million active users) could pose a greater threat than a third-party Bluesky bridge.
For now, Barrett is still working on Bridgy Fed so it will be ready when Bluesky federates. If anything, his brief stint as “fediverso main character” reinforced his focus on security.
"I'm thinking and feeling deeply that, regardless of how content moderation works on both sides of the bridge, it needs to be at least as good as it is for native fediverse users, and vice versa," Barrett said. “I’m in trouble if I post this.”
