Phew! It’s been quite a few days, Bridgy Fed is up to almost 2500 bridged accounts total. Thanks again for all of your interest! I’ve been in a constant state of whiplash, back and forth between hearing “this is so cool!” and “it’s broken in these 10 different ways.”
I love that you all are enjoying it! And it absolutely is broken in all of those ways, and more. I’m sorry. I’d planned on a bit more time to iron out bugs first, but c’est la vie. Testing in production! 🤷
I’m seeing most of the problems break down into four broad buckets, which I’m tackling in this order:
Bridging stuff from Bluesky to the fediverse is flaky and unreliable. True. This is largely because it’s currently based on polling. I’m in the middle of switching it to the Bluesky firehose; that should hopefully be complete within a day or two.
Bridging stuff from the fediverse to Bluesky sometimes stops working. True. Bridgy Fed isn’t as rigorous about validating Bluesky records as it needs to be, so when we emit an invalid record in one user’s repo, I suspect the Bluesky relay gets stuck and won’t accept any more for that user. Fixing some parts of this may be tricky, but it’s still very fixable.
Lots of things don’t translate right, or at all. True. This is annoying, but seems lower priority than the unreliability buckets, and most of these bugs are straightforward to fix, so I’m focusing on reliability first.
Scaling is inefficient and expensive. True. OK, I’m the only one seeing this, but it’s still true. 😎 Fortunately I’m not too worried, since I’m confident I’ll be able to optimize it. Make it work, then make it right, then make it fast (and cheap), in that order.
I’ll continue to post updates here now and then. You can also follow the now label on Bridgy Fed’s GitHub issues to see what I’m focusing on at any given moment. Thanks again for all of the interest, and for your patience. It’ll get better, one step at a time.
Hi all! Well, I didn’t plan it, but word got out anyway: Bridgy Fed‘s Bluesky <=> fediverse support went online a couple weeks ago, quietly and without announcement, but people still found it. Over 1200 accounts have turned it on so far and bridged themselves one direction or the other. It’s great to see so much early interest!
It’s still very early, and I wasn’t quite prepared for this much volume this quickly. Expect lots of bugs, missing features, downtime, and other rough edges. The docs are mostly up to date, at least. If you hit a problem, search the open issues, and if you don’t see it there, feel free to file it.
Also, much of the current state is not final. Expect some design and policy choices to change. For example, right now you have to manually enable the bridge, but that may change eventually, at least for Bluesky accounts bridging into the fediverse.
Otherwise, there’s a ton to do, and I’m only one person, doing this on the side, so progress will be slow. They say if you don’t feel uncomfortable when you ship, you probably waited too long, so let me just say that I feel very uncomfortable right now, hopefully in a good way. 😀 Thanks again for all the interest, and for your patience!
I’m also blocking launch on building the opt in/out prompt idea that came out of the blowup. Thank you all (and Kio!) again for that idea, I really do appreciate it. I wish I’d come up with it beforehand, would have saved everyone the headache. But it seems like this – getting feedback before launch and incorporating it – is the system working, at least in some ways, which is good.
The current design is that a Bridgy Fed instance actor (user) will DM you the first time anyone on Bluesky requests to follow or interact with you over the bridge. If you reply yes, or follow the Bridgy Fed user, you’ll be bridged. If you reply no, or ignore the DM, or block that user, you won’t be. You’ll also be able to follow or block the Bridgy Fed user to opt in or out proactively, ahead of time.
On a related note, I still think there’s a tension between the fediverse’s current default of open, opt-out federation and its culture of consent and opt-in. That tension is magnified by the fact that the fediverse has always been multi-protocol, not just ActivityPub but also OStatus, Diaspora, and Zot/Nomad, among others, so boundaries between networks have been fuzzy at best.
For people who want it, consent-based/opt-in federation is the most promising solution that I’ve heard so far. Beyond that, I don’t have any answers of my own, but there’s obviously been lots of discussion over the last couple months, which feels like a good sign.
Tamagotchis sure have come a long way. Kid proudly informed me just now that she doesn’t need to bring hers with us running errands because she hired a babysitter for it. 🧐
My dad has spent some of his retirement doing hobbyist machine learning projects. He heard the term “data lake” a while back and has taken to calling his datasets a “data swamp.” Feels like a terminology improvement the whole field could get behind.
Bryan has said that sometimes (often?) you don’t know your own project’s values, at least up front, and boy did that land here. Definitely a valuable exercise. Feedback is welcome!
Bridgy Fed status update ( fed.brid.gy )
https://snarfed.org/bridgy_logo.png...