Social networks Bluesky and Mastodon may soon be accessible from within one app. At least, that's what Bluesky hopes. This new decentralized social network was originally founded within Twitter, run by Jack Dorsey, and will connect, or “bridge”, Mastodon's requests with Bluesky's, allowing consumer-facing apps like Ivory to connect with him as well. We are supporting the project to make it compatible with Bluesky.
The project, dubbed SkyBridge, received a small grant from Bluesky of $4,800 to be distributed throughout the project. SkyBridge was his second largest recipient in this current cohort, receiving his $800 of the total.
Bluesky announced last month that it would use some of the funding to further its developer ecosystem efforts through the AT Protocol Grant program. From a financial point of view, this program is rather insignificant, since as a grant he is only provided with $ 10,000, and already he has been distributed $ 4,800. That alone is not enough to start a new company in this space, but it is a way to encourage developers who want to delve into new AT protocols anyway. This also serves as an early signal of the type of development work that Bluesky supports. This could help drive adoption among developers, who have previously (and repeatedly) come under fire for Twitter and its shifting priorities.
Other program recipients are doing valuable work as well.
For example, Blacksky Algorithms is building a suite of services that provides custom moderation services to Bluesky's Black users. Others are building Bluesky consumer apps, developer tools, analytics resources, and more.
But SkyBridge is particularly interesting because it has the potential to open up this small startup to a wider audience.
Unlike Mastodon and other decentralized apps that leveraged the old ActivityPub protocol, Bluesky is developing a new decentralized social networking protocol. Unfortunately for end users who have started exploring the open source social network widely known as the “Fediverse”, Bluesky's decision to build on another protocol means that users have started to explore Bluesky's network. This means you have to switch apps to access it. This means you can't use your favorite Mastodon app to browse Bluesky content.
If successful, SkyBridge could transform this situation by converting Mastodon API calls into Bluesky API calls. This bridge is currently being tested on Ivory on iOS and Mac. This is his Mastodon app from the company that previously developed a popular third-party Twitter app called Tweetbot. According to SkyBridge developer @videah.net (on Bluesky), the project is currently undergoing a major rewrite from Dart to Rust. As a result, the GitHub repository hasn't seen much activity lately.
Still, he thinks the job is promising.
“It has already proven to be much more stable and we hope to unveil it soon,” Videah posted on Bluesky when sharing news of the grant.
Bluesky currently has nearly 5.6 million users and the broader fediverse, backed by ActivityPub, has more than 10 million users. Instagram Threads (integrated with ActivityPub) now has more than 150 million monthly active users, Meta announced during its earnings call this week.
The move to bridge Bluesky and Mastodon has been the subject of some recent discussion. People disagree about how bridges should be built, or whether they should be built at all. Another software developer, Ryan Barrett, received some backlash on GitHub when he built another bridge called Bridgy Fed. This is opted out by default. This means that even if the author of the post hasn't opted in to this, Mastodon's posts will appear on his Bluesky. . He instead recalibrated his plans to build a discoverable opt-in that would allow users to request to follow accounts on different networks.
With the help of SkyBridge, Bluesky has demonstrated a desire to blur the lines between Mastodon and Bluesky.
Eventually, you may no longer need to think about which protocol your app runs on, just as you don't think about email clients that use SMTP, POP3, or IMAP. And the ideal outcome would be that people would be able to connect with their friends on any social network, regardless of their base, and also see replies from their friends.