Bridges like Bridgy-Fed and others can connect Fediverse to interact with Bluesky from their Fediverse account. Bridges are an opt-in which I think its a great thing for privacy. But at the same time, I don’t think the majority of Fediverse users who would be interested in using bridges know that they exist.
What I am suggesting is that large Fediverse instances (and Bluesky) encourage and make it easy to use brigdes by having an easy tool to turn on or turn off bridges.
An example situation could be when someone creates an account on mastadon.social, a small pop up shows ups explaining what bridges are in two-three sentences, and has a recommended bridge to use along with a drop down of other options to choose from, and ask it they would like to bridge or not like to bridge.
I do wish that Lemmy instances would do this.
If a Fedi or BSky instance wants to support connecting to the other side, they should implement both protocols. Bridges are just a duct-tape solution.
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I don’t really like bridges, tends to be very clunky. I recently interacted with a bridged account over mastodon and it was a really pluf experience.
I don’t really like bluesky anyway. I won’t invest in a platform that will be bought and enthisitfy by some fascists as twitter was.
I agree with your perspective that the people who might most be interested in bridges are also the least likely to be aware it’s something they can opt into
Bluesky proper won’t do that because it threatens their network effect.
The Bridge should just work based on the account’s discoverable flag, ie if it’s true you’re opted into the Bridge.
Thats a really interesting and novel idea! You could also give granularity based off of that, so people still have ultimate control, but then it’s only one setting you have to learn about and it’s not following an account, which feels like a hacky UX
Aren’t there already fedi platforms that connect to Bluesky like WAFRN for people who want it?
most people join the fedi to get away from shit like bluesky, so until they become actually decentralized i think most fedi instances should block/ban bridges if anything. the current status quo of bridges being around for those who want/need them but are easily ignorable for the rest of us is probably the best case scenario right now
I don’t think bridges are bad. Sure bsky may not be the ideal decentralized social platform, but still a lot of interesting people have moved there and it wouldn’t be so bad to see what’s going on with them, and also maybe interact with them. In a way this feels like homemade bsky decentralization (until bsky maybe enshittifies and chooses burns them down some day, that is)
No.
The platforms should provide inter-protocol bridging natively. Now we have to follow an unrelated (to either) account and hope that it not fails silently*. This should be a switch in the UI.
*at least one can follow bridged accounts from elsewhere without bridging oneself.
This is a good point. I wonder why this isn’t the default
wafrn and Hubzilla both do this. But in general, developers of most ActivityPub-based platforms prefer to focus on AP, and already have a lot on their plate; Bluesky wants to focus on AT, and similarly has a lot on their plate; and most users don’t actually care that much … so nobody’s likely to prioritize it.
