Recently, Ryan Barrett re-announced his Bridgy Fed project to the Fediverse. As a service, it’s designed wih one specific goal in mind: to make parts of the decenralized social web that speak different protocols capable of talking to each other natively.

For the last few years, Ryan has been hard at work building a sytem that can natively speak IndieWeb, ActivityPub, atproto, and Nostr, and translate interactions back and forth in a manner as close to natural as possible.

Who is Ryan Barrett?

Ryan Barrett is a software engineer with a long track record. He co-founded Google App Engine, worked at an early cancer-detection company called Color, then as an engineer for a Climate Tech startup called NCX.

We actually interviewed Ryan recently for our Decentered podcast, and we think that it’s the best summary we can provide on what he’s working on, what his thoughts are, and the effort he takes to get the details right.

Overall, he has a deep understanding of the space, and wants to provide a tool for anyone to use. He’s also someone who has thought at length about community moderation, and wrote an excellent piece called Moderate People, Not Code.

What is Bridgy Fed?

Bridgy Fed is an effort to create a multi-protocol communication server that can translate people, content, and interactions back and forth between networks that speak different protocols.

For now, it only speaks IndieWeb and ActivityPub, but Ryan has put in a lot of effort into making it speak the AT Protocol (Bluesky) and Nostr as well. Those are due to come in the following weeks, and were a central focus in Ryan’s announcement.

How Did the Community Respond?

To be fair, a sizeable amount of people had good things to say about the new development, and many IndieWeb and Bluesky users were supportive and even excited.

Unfortunately, an extremely vocal part of Mastodon expressed a range of negative reactions, going from critiques to insults to vitriol, demanding everything from the developer deleting his project to Ryan leaving the network permanently.

Looking through the comments, most negative feedback touches on the following:

1. This tool violates user consent by being opt-out, rather than opt-in.
2. I don’t want my profile and content showing up on Jack Dosey’s corporate social network.

So, let’s take a moment to unpack this, because it’s not as cut and dry as it appears.

User Consent and the Fediverse

The main controversy people seem to have in the Fediverse boils down to the fact that users have to Opt-Out of the service, rather than Opt-In. But, there’s a few fundamental misunderstandings here:

Federation itself is Opt-Out

A lot of people responded to Ryan with statements about how Bridgy Fed’s Opt-out nature violated their consent. In some cases, it got really nasty.

Here’s the thing: everyone wants to bang on this idea that the Fediverse is based on consent, that users are the ones at the forefront of who they get to connect to, that those decisions are inherently opt-in, and users get to decide everything.

But, that’s a myth: the very nature of how federation works in this space is “Open By Default”.

To prevent messages and interactions from flowing in and out of a place, users or admins have to activately block a server. What this fundamentally means is that the Fediverse is opt-out by design; connections flow until they don’t.

Evan Prodromou, of OStatus and ActivityPub fame, even weighed in on the topic:

The point of the fediverse is to connect with others, with full control and safety. It’s for making connections between networks of different sizes and implementations.

We have ample tools to control who can connect with us on the fediverse — the visibility of our posts, deciding who can and can’t follow us, personal blocks, domain blocks, and filters. Extra opt-out features like a profile hashtag, searchability flags, or indexibility flags give even more control.

With any other network on the fediverse, we allow connections to get started first, and then use these control mechanisms to shape our experience as individuals and as instance communities. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do that with this bridge, too.
Evan Prodromou

That isn’t some random dude, that’s the guy who started the Fediverse, stating that the network being open by default is how things ought to be.

If any connections on the Fediverse were opt-in, people would have to opt in to federation on a case-by-case basis. This would seriously hamper the growth of Mastodon, and clashes with its own “open by default” philosophy. Bridgy’s own design values are more in line with what Mastodon does than against it.

Bridgy Fed isn’t a Crawler

A big part of the drama stems from the fact that people have assumptions about how Bridgy Fed works. Turns out, it’s not a bot that crawls the Fediverse and harvests user data! In fact, it doesn’t index anything, or offer search functionality of any kind. The dude isn’t building a data farm!

So then, what is Bridgy Fed doing, exactly?

An easy way to grasp this is to look at how interacting with remote stuff works in Mastodon. Let’s say you look up a remote user handle, or a URL to a post, using Mastodon’s search interface. Your server looks up that resource, fetches the data, and renders it locally for you to interact with.

Bridgy Fed and User Privacy

Bridgy Fed is basically doing exactly that, with just one extra step: it’s translating data on another network to something your own system can read, and it can work in two directions. That’s basically it.

There are also a couple of aspects of how Bridgy Fed works with user privacy settings and actions:

• Bridgy accepts user blocks from ActivityPub, and also federates out edits and deletes. Actor blocks, reports, and domain blocks are recognized, and Bridgy respects Authorized Fetch.
• Private statuses are not ingested by the bridge, because the other protocols don’t have an equivalent for private conversations.
• If a user has #[url=https://wedistribute.org/tag/nobridge/]NoBridge[/url] on their profile or requests exclusion ahead of time, a cross-network lookup will fail for that user automatically, from every network, every time the lookup is attempted.

Bridgy and Multiprotocol Servers

Bridging across networks is something of a time-honored tradition in the decentralized social space. In more recent years, the Friendica family tree has acted as a glue between vast parts of the network, getting its hooks into OStatus, Diaspora, and ActivityPub in addition to their own native protocols.

While there has been hiccups, dissonance, and occasionally frustration, these kinds of efforts have helped expand the network while keeping it from being a total monoculture. Many projects within the early Fediverse were able to find inspiration from one another, despite taking different approaches to solving various problems.

The idea of a public post being translated into another protocol being considered a violation of consent is, frankly, unprecedented. But, this was never about converting a post schema from one JSON form to another, was it? In its basic form, who could possibly care about that?

No, this is about your post showing up on *that other network*.

Misunderstanding Bluesky

Maybe none of the above details matter to you. Maybe you’ve decided, screw this guy for connecting my posts to Jack Dorsey’s fake decentralized network!

If this is your position, I have a few notes for you!

1. Jack Dorsey doesn’t own Bluesky! Aside from a position as a sitting board member in an advisory role, he’s actually not involved. In fact, he deleted his Bluesky account some months ago, and spends almost all of his time hyping Nostr and Bitcoin.
2. Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation – while it’s true that they’re still a corporation, and still have some kind of profit motive, this immediately changes the dynamic from “a platform owned by some rich guy” to “a platform owned by a company”.
3. Federation is coming soon – the Bluesky team has been actively testing federation and building for it. A lot of people claim that Bluesky doesn’t care about federation, and isn’t going to do it…but, it’s happening soon. If a network can federate, and other people can run their own nodes and services, the network itself isn’t Jack Dorsey’s, or even one entity’s.

We have an upcoming article that’s going to dig deeper into some of the myths about Bluesky. But the main point here is, Bluesky isn’t the Anti-Christ to the Fediverse that people claim that it is. It’s a different approach, by different people. That’s it.

In Conclusion

I chose to write this as an Opinion piece, because I don’t expect my point of view to be The Only View That Matters. I think Bridgy Fed is a cool project, and that Ryan doesn’t deserve the hate for building something he’s passionate about in his spare time.

I was struck by a really remarkable thread by Marco Rogers, who sorted through his feelings on the situation and identified the “ick” factor in this whole situation.

In short, who are you yelling at? Who do you expect to "fix" things for you? Right now people are coming down on the guy who is building the bridge to bluesky. That specific guy. They're yelling at him and telling him to make different decisions to protect their personal privacy. Is that what people think they signed up for with the fediverse? Fighting with other individual humans and trying to force them to do what you want?

— Marco Rogers (@polotek) 2024-02-14T02:21:27.923Z

This is a decentralized network! Despite efforts to work together, optimize for user safety, and identify actively hostile communities, none of us are in charge. We can bring great initiatives, collaborations, tooling, you name it, but nobody is actually in charge here.

I want to be clear about my stance on user consent: I think it’s a good thing, and worth building for, even in a network where openness is the default. I think serious work needs to be done to better empower end users over privacy, access, and permissions. We can do better, in so many ways, and that future is coming.

But throwing a fit over your public data federating to some other network because someone on the other side decided to follow you from there? That’s some peak NIMBY Mastodon HOA bullshit. I would forgive them for unfollowing you.

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Marco Rogers

2024-02-03 19:04:04

I've spent significant time on Bluesky and Mastodon for the last few months. They're very different experiences, and I like them both for different reasons. But I think they are headed in different directions. They're going to continue to diverge in terms of what they offer.