Bridging the fediverse #activitypub #fediverse #illuminant
A couple of years ago I started making an ActivityPub server to make it easy for me to access the fediverse over nntp.
One of the challenges - at least in the way I built my server - is that every server it talks to speaks a slightly different dialect of ActivityPub. Mastodon generates JSON with one structure, Pleroma might include a field that others don't, GotoSocial might leave one out, etc. etc.
Around a month ago Klaus lured me into trying the Bluesky↔Fediverse bridge Bridgy Fed. TechCrunch had a nice introduction on how to bridge your account, which I followed.
And then I had to adjust my ActivityPub server to the quirks of the bridge. Usually it's stuff like "this field I have only ever encountered having a string as the value, but now it's a dictionary, or a list", and it takes me a while to handle all of them.
Had I implemented the spec rather than just building something and trying it against other servers, I would probably have fewer of these surprises. But, hey, I was (and still am) building Illuminant for fun, so I was happy to implement just enough to interact.
One thing that in hindsight is sort of expected and also sort of a downer is that boosts and parent blueskidoos only show up if the sender's account is bridged. So rather than being a useful expanse of the fediverse, this bridging turns out - to me, anyway - to be more of a curiosity than anything else.
The lack of context crossing the bridge combined with the wish not to be an enabler has made me drop the bridging again, this type of lackluster "federation" does not seem a net-positive to me.
- Adam Sjøgren 🕥︎ - 2025-05-31