Bridge as a service...
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Reflecting on justbsocial.eu's recent launch, I wonder whether anewsocial@mastodon.social is thinking about creating a bridge as a service product to connect existing social networks to the fediverse.
Having them start from scratch is a barrier in many ways!
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@julian It's something @snarfed.org and I have discussed a few times, but it's a huge project to take on, and we'd probably wait until someone has a real need for it. We've spoken to a few partners, and everyone is good using our instance atm, but we know the steps we need to take to make it happen.
NB: We make it really easy for instances to set up a bridging switch + default custom domains already: https://fed.brid.gy/docs#bluesky-handle-api
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@julian All that said, one of my fears is a centralized bridge, so I *would* like to do this at some point if we have bandwidth.
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quillmatiq@mastodon.social thanks! The general context behind it was that I'm doing some outreach to local networks and occasionally I see attempts at forming digital spaces. It's one thing to tell a community "hey set up a forum or mastodon or similar", but it's another thing altogether then they have an existing product and I have to say "hey now you have to implement this protocol, good luck!"
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@julian Ah, gotcha - so less bridging protocols, more bridging non-protocol services to protocol-based networks. That's a *whole* other can of worms, but I would argue the correct approach would be to pick up something like @fedify or the existing ATProto PDS implementations and translate on top of those (like what Ghost did), then use bridges to connect to other protocols (also like what Ghost did!).
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@Anuj Ahooja This makes me wonder if a decentralised, anyone-can-host-it third-party bridge that's only a bridge would be feasible.
Of course, it'd be the easiest to integrate such a bridge directly into Fediverse server software. But we've only got so many multi-protocol Fediverse server applications right now already, and the only one that's still occasionally adding new protocols or even a bridge is Friendica. It is therefore the only Fediverse server software that can connect to Bluesky without Bridgy Fed.
CC: @A New Social
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Friendica #Bluesky -
jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu not quite! gabboman@app.wafrn.net is developing WAFRN which connects to BlueSky.
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snarfed.org@fed.brid.gy I wanted to tag you but I wasn't sure which account to tag
