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Ryan Barrett posted about his forthcoming #ATProtocol <> #ActivityPub bridge and had a lot of people lose their minds

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://snarfed.org/2024-02-12_52106

He wrote a great article back in January entitled “Moderate people, not code” that is good background

> “Whether ActivityPub or ATProto or webmention, the underlying technical protocol a community uses to interact online is a poor way to judge who they are and whether you might like them.”

https://snarfed.org/2024-01-21_moderate-people-not-code

in reply to Boris Mann

I’m going to attempt to explain in general terms how I think about an #ActivityPub bridge.

I’m over on Bluesky. I see this interesting ActivityPub account coop-AT-cosocial-dot-ca. I’d like to follow it!

It has open follows, so the bridge subscribes to that account on my behalf. It’s kind of like a “bridge instance”.

Depending on how the bridge is implemented, maybe you see boris-bluesky-AT-bridge-instance

in reply to Boris Mann

This is similar to your feed reader (a foreign network protocol) subscribing to the RSS feed of your Mastodon account.

It’s open. The rules of the protocol are being followed. There is no opt-in for that RSS feed — other than turning on “request to follow” in your Mastodon account.

in reply to Boris Mann

Thank you for this reflection. I think that's a really healthy attitude. Social media should be about meeting people where they are, not implicitly banning them until they join you in your tech choices. Anything that supports helping people connect as openly as possible is a good thing.

Compare to email. Yes, I would much prefer everyone to join me in hosting their email at a co-op with FLOSS tools. But in the meantime, I'm glad we can still email each other.

in reply to Nathan Schneider

@ntnsndr I'm not glad I'm mailed by spammers, so no we don't have to accept communication with people who's choices of tech already show that you might not want to connect with them.
Bridge is fine and all, but I personally wouldn't count on those connecting me with networks which don't really care about openness and federation.
Open doesn't mean to be open to those who don't want openness. Similar with tolerance.

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