It’s time for a special holiday Bridgy Fed status update!
Since last time, we’ve been working mostly on getting A New Social off the ground and on Bridgy Fed internals. Specifically, my development focus for a while now has been cost cutting. I fund Bridgy Fed myself right now, which I’m happy to do, but it costs more to run than it should, probably by 2-3x or so.
(We do plan to fundraise for A New Social eventually and fund Bridgy Fed there instead! Including individual donations, among other sources. Stay tuned for more news when we have it.)
In the meantime, I’ve been pushing the optimization boulder uphill, making slow progress. I’m currently struggling with one big issue: getting caching working in ndb, our ORM.
ndb can cache both in memory and in memcache. We configure it to do both, but it doesn’t seem to be using memcache in production, and I’m not even sure it’s caching in memory there either. If you have experience with ndb, Google Cloud Datastore, Memorystore, or related tools, please take a look and let me know if you see anything obviously wrong!
This also means that I haven’t had much time to spend on features, bug fixes, or other user-visible updates. I’m the only developer on Bridgy Fed right now, and I’m only part time. I’d love help! It’s entirely open source, so if you’re interested, check out the open issues, feel free to dive in, and ping me on GitHub if you have any questions!
Having said that, I have done a bit besides cost cutting since last time:
- Generate link previews (aka embeds) on Bluesky.
- Launch Threads support! Just via normal ActivityPub, nothing special, but I worked with them a fair amount on interop.
- Improve sign-up flow for web => Bluesky bridging.
- Try harder to redirect fediverse @-mentions of bridged users to their web site or Bluesky profile.
- Reduce confusion on the home page sign-up form by detecting web sites that are already fediverse instances.
- Let fediverse accounts re-enable the bridge even if they disabled it before October.
- Improve interop with Friendica, Hubzilla, Misskey/Sharkey, Sharkey, WordPress Friends plugin, and GoToSocial.
- Improve authorization to prevent a cache poisoning attack.
- Improve DNS scaling for Bluesky handles.
- Populate the
discoverableandindexableflags on bridged ActivityPub actors. - Misc bug fixes for web sites on www subdomains.
- Fix rare bug where we occasionally missed bridging posts or other interactions to Bluesky.
- Fix rare bug where we occasionally missed bridging deletes.
- Continued debugging of accounts bridged into Bluesky that occasionally get stuck and stop bridging.
- Lots of docs improvements.
As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports. You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!
@snarfed.org@fed.brid.gy Thank you for all your work. What you’re doing for the open web is amazing.
I am very grateful for can use with my website and Bluesky Bridge. I think your project of connecting scattered social media is truly great. Thank you very much.
@snarfed.org Great. Thanks a lot for your work.
@snarfed.org@fed.brid.gy Thanks for the great work on Bridgy Fed! I really hopes this project could be expanded even bigger towards its goal.
ブログの記事に対して Mastodon Misskey Bluesky からコメントできてるのほんとBridgy Fedの素晴らしさを表してると思う(サイト自体もブリッジされてる)
https://snarfed.org/2024-12-21_54377
@snarfed.org continues bringing so much good stuff with Bridgy Fed – thank you very much!
Emphasis and [context] mine:
That’s an understatement if I ever saw one, the list of improvements that follows is huge and changes substantive :D
@snarfed.org @quillmatiq Awesome! Thank you for all your hard work.
@snarfed.org You are doing incredible work with Bridgy Fed, keep it up! Thanks for helping to bring things together.