A Feed from the Future

I created another feed. I had the idea while reading about the awesome news from AltStore yesterday.

The details of AltStore's announcement aren't relevant to this story. Just that they are going all in on the Fediverse and will be bridging to the AT Protocol (ATProto) using BridgyFed.

This is fantastic news. The Open Social Web continues to grow as more people control of their speech and it's distribution. It got me wondering, where can I see this social web thing in action? What's the vision?

As I see it, the future state we are building towards is a world where people connect on their own terms. Where you choose to do your social, what app you post with, should not limit who you can connect with.

BridgyFed is a project by A New Social , a small organization working to make the open social web work.

Our mission is to liberate people's networks from their platforms, enabling The Last Network Effect and leveling the playing field across the open social web.

We believe that a healthy ecosystem competes on innovative features, not critical mass. The social web should be centered around people, not platforms, and artificial walls should not deny them the relationships they've built online.

Their technology allows people to post on their protocol of choice, be it ActivityPub or ATProto or Nostr, and still engage with people who chose a different protocol. I can have a microblog thread with a Mastodon user, even though I am a Bluesky user.

So what? I can bloop at someone else's bleep even though my blorgs are different from their glarbs? Yes yes, it's all spaghetti O's to look at. Let me put it this way. I should not have to abide by the TOS of a company if I don't want to, even if the people I talk to have decided to do so. All of my friends are on Instagram. I don't like Meta's policies. Instagram is a closed platform, so I cannot keep up with my friends on Instagram without agreeing to their TOS. That's bullshit.

BridgyFeed represents the world we can have. It brings together accounts from multiple different open social protocols into one feed. Everybody can see and interact with the posts on BridgyFeed, regardless of which protocol they decided to sign up for. I am a Bluesky user, and I can have a conversation with a Mastodon user. Neither of us agreed to the TOS of the other app. Yet here we are, sending each other little notes over the internet.

I built BridgyFeed using Graze.social, a fantastic tool for creating Bluesky feeds. You can view the feed and it's algorithm below.

BridgyFeed

A nexus of open social webbed sites. Posts come from all across the open social web, including Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr. Follow @ap.brid.gy to bridge your account to the Fediverse.

All it does is include any account which

is bridged into Bluesky (identified by the ap.brid.gy at the end of their handle)

bridges out of Bluesky (by following @ap.brid.gy)

If you want to see your posts in BridgyFeed, or want to open your account to the whole open social web, check out Bridgy Fed .

And if you somehow made it here but have not dipped your toe into the world beyond Meta and Snap and Microsoft, who collectively own Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Whatsapp, Snapchat, and LinkedIn, come join me on the open social web. I'm @tynanpurdy.com . I'd recommend starting with Bluesky.

Bluesky

Social media as it should be. Find your community among millions of users, unleash your creativity, and have some fun again.