Mastodon and Bluesky show interoperability in action

Even after two years of Musk damaging X/Twitter so badly Fidelity has now marked down its own holdings by 78.7% (😱), alternative services not run by billionaires have still not reached anything like its scale. I have two hypotheses:

• The interactions which make social networking services (SNSes) so worthwhile are by definition much harder to build up when there are far fewer users — the chicken and egg problem which so entrenches incumbents. Twitter previously was quite open to tools connecting other services, but Musk has since made them unaffordable for most developers.
• While it’s perfectly possible for users to maintain accounts on multiple (free!) services, and flip between apps (known as multi-homing), this does impose some cognitive load — learning to use multiple tools/services while avoiding (potentially highly visible) mistakes; maintaining multiple contexts; and seeing the same content multiple times from users who cross-post it on several services, while having to interact with it on a per-service basis — which again reduces positive network effects.

Several released-recently tools are starting to address these problems, by enabling interoperability at least between two major replacement services: Mastodon (part of the wider Fediverse) and Bluesky (which benefited in particular from Brazil’s temporary banning of X for Musk’s attempts to defy its Supreme Court’s rulings on disinformation). And Meta is (slowly) linking its service Threads to the Fediverse, allowing users in 100+ countries to enable interaction with their posts from other Fediverse tools.

Network effects mean the value of social networks grows faster-than-linearly with number of users, so adding Mastodon and Bluesky’s millions of users together can make a big difference — while Threads eventually could have a huge impact.

Openvibe is a young but already pretty polished app which lets users view their Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads accounts in one timeline, and post content to multiple services. In the few weeks I’ve been using it, I’ve found (to my surprise) the additional simplicity of using a single app has made a big difference to how often I look at Mastodon and Bluesky.

Openvibe does not (yet) have a sharing extension for macOS/iOS to make it easy to post content from websites and news apps, which is the main type of posting I do. For now, I’m using the (excellent) Ivory to do that, and Skymoth to automatically copy my Mastodon posts to Bluesky (after asking my Bluesky followers if they would welcome this — which they did, while my follower numbers have slowly but steadily increased since). UPDATE: I’m now interacting directly enough with other Bluesky users, I’ve turned off Skymoth, and suggested people follow my bridged account instead — see below.

I also use the ActivityPub WordPress plug-in to make this blog available in the Fediverse — you can follow @ian@ianbrown.tech to see new posts in full, and even comment on them by replying! And the WordPress Bluesky and LinkedIn plugins let me auto-share posts on those networks (although I often then manually tweak the posts).

Meanwhile, I’m really impressed by Bridgy.Fed, which lets Fediverse and Bluesky users follow each other, and interact with posts. I’m particularly pleased it Bluesky-reposts my Mastodon-reposts from people who are also using it 🤗 (as well as making my Mastodon account visible in Bluesky searches, and vice versa.)

I also like that Bridgy.Fed just introduced a form of “active choice” to ask users (once, via DM) if they want to enable bridging. It’s essential users retain control over where their posts flow, but a purely manual, non-prompted opt-in mechanism would most likely lead to extremely slow growth.

It’s not clear how far Threads will promote its Fediverse opt-in to its 200m+ monthly active users, although that has huge potential. Threads growth has obviously benefited greatly from its Instagram integration (as well as its celebrity users 🤣).

The only issue with my current set-up is Mastodon posts over 300 characters don’t display as well on Bluesky. I’m looking for a way to auto-limit my Mastodon post length (ideally via the iOS/macOS sharing extension I use to post articles). Then (once it’s supported) I’ll redirect my main Bluesky username to the bridged account! UPDATE: I’ve found I interact separately enough on Bluesky to make it worthwhile keeping a separate account there, reading it along with my Mastodon account using Openvibe.

Now, back to forcing incumbent SNSes (like X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn) to enable similar interoperability functionality, via the EU’s Digital Markets Act or other legal mechanisms 😉

PS I’m still using X for now, to reach the large community I built up there since 2008, but deliberately limiting my posts to encourage people to sign up to Mastodon/Bluesky. If you want a tool to cross-post to all three services, Buffer does it for free! As I see X users move to Bluesky or Mastodon, I follow them there instead.

PPS Greater reach for illegal or malicious content is often a concern for those unsure about interoperability. So it’s interesting to see the development of independent services to detect such content (particularly Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM)) — although when it moves into other areas, such as “violent extremism”, there will be more difficult calls to make from a freedom of expression perspective (one famous example: supporting the African National Congress in its ultimately violent anti-apartheid campaign, which eventually led to the negotiated replacement of the racist pre-1994 South African regime).

These classification tools could be deployed in bridges and cross-posting services (perhaps user-optionally, for content which is not straightforwardly illegal, such as known CSAM reported by law enforcement agencies), as well as Mastodon/Bluesky hosts and end-user clients 🧐

UPDATE: Two weeks after Donald Trump won his second term as US President with significant help from the dilettante owner of X, it seems this political catastrophe might finally be enough to create a critical mass at Bluesky (now with 20m users and counting). But these interoperability tools will remain important to reduce the chance of Bluesky suffering the same enshittification as X — even (or especially) if it reaches the hundreds of millions of users of X, or the billions of Facebook.