Interoperability with Mastodon/ActivityPub #1716
Replies: 17 comments 14 replies
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Hi Erik! Important question. It's been discussed a ton, both elsewhere and here, eg https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub, #255, #345, #1656, etc, but always good to keep talking! At the risk of putting words into the team's mouths, their position so far has generally been:
I largely agree with that stance. Fortunately, the team is supportive of external efforts to bridge the protocols, which is what I've been working on with Bridgy Fed. Recent status update here; some technical details here. Feedback and contributions are welcome! |
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Thanks - I completely understand the practical difficulty of getting to millions of users and making the protocol work, and having to prioritize that over interoperability work. However, I do think it's crucial to make certain interoperability commitments early, so they can be factored into design decisions. Some things will probably never work across servers, and that's fine. For example, maybe certain kinds of posts just can't be federated (or might need to be shortened or replaced by placeholder). An example approach for that could be to identify some key user stories, e.g.
and stating clearly which ones are in scope for long term interoperability goals and which ones aren't. Further, even knowing that interoperability (with qualifiers) is a long term goal for the project, and what conditions will need to be satisfied before it can be prioritized by Bluesky the company, would be useful. None of this is to take away from your bridging efforts, which I agree are important and useful. However, there is a risk of bridges falling down, especially when there is no first-party commitment to interoperability from the biggest node operators & companies supporting the respective projects. Beyond that, bridges can add further UX hurdles to an already complicated idea (following users on another server). |
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Thanks for the kind words! And absolutely agreed, bridging is always awkward, worse UX, and a degraded experience compared to native compatibility. I'll mostly defer to the team on whether they want to discuss/answer this again. Historically though, so far they've generally said that native AP/fediverse compatibility is not on their roadmap. Beyond the reasons above, one way to think about it is that the protocols are so different that you can't just add compatibility. They'd have to build a full fledged bridge themselves, internally, to be compatible. And that internal bridge would be awkward in many of the ways that my external bridge will be - identifiers and handles don't translate intuitively, composable moderation labels and feed algorithms may not translate at all, fediverse users would hate the idea of their profiles and posts being ingested by Bluesky BGSes/AppViews, etc. Also, effort wise, we can't just estimate story points for a handful of user stories, pick the top few, and optimize ROI that way. Due to AT Protocol's design itself, going from 0 to 1 to translate anything external into ATProto takes a ton of work. It's like if the initial mandatory translation layer was scoped at 100 story points, and then following was 5 story points, posts were 7, reporting was 2, etc. I'm obviously with you on interop! Bridge all the things. Just trying to explain what their position has been (and probably still is), and why it makes sense to me at least. |
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There are a bunch of ideas, possibilities, and open questions here, which make it difficult to give a direct answer. Can ActivityPub/Mastodon content be transformed and represented in atproto, and vica versa? Seems pretty likely! atproto has a flexible schema system ("Lexicons") and it should be possible to make a pretty direct representation of the relevant schemas used by Mastodon. Likewise ActivityPub allows new event schemas, and the Can subscriptions flow between the two protocols, at scale? This seems harder. ActivityPub has a concept of per-server inboxes and outboxes between individual accounts. atproto has a concept of aggregating global public content in to a unified firehose, and indexing that. Those are pretty different network architectures to reconcile. Can core expectations of privacy, safety, and moderation be respected across both protocols? This seems like a challenge. atproto is currently entirely globally public and enumerable, including blocks. ActivityPub/Mastodon has a lot more nuance: a lot of information is openly accessible, or can be scraped or inferred, but there is meaningful friction involved. Naive following and feeds is very simple: unauthenticated RSS has been implemented for atproto (at least as a demo), and I assume the same for ActivityPub/Mastodon. But how do blocks, mutes, labeling, blocklists, reply controls, and future moderation/interaction rules work out? These are somewhat challenging to ensure even within the same protocol. Can clients support both? Yes, there are already multiple clients which can fan out a post to multiple networks, and browse content from multiple networks. Can folks reply across protocol? Eg, a hybrid reply thread? This seems hard without some form of bridging. Can graph aggregations be computed across protocols? Eg, like and follow account. Probably, though doesn't seems like a super high priority. Can identity be mapped across both protocols? Superficially, "in many cases", sure. But the underlying properties are different, and things would break down with account migration, which are an important feature of both protocols. Will there be some way for Bluesky or any atproto service to implement direct compatibility with ActivityPub standard, or vica-versa? In a meaningful way? Seems like a stretch. As a direct answer, phrased this way, it is not on the Bluesky roadmap. All of the Fediverse (the community/ecosystem), Mastodon (the company and project), and Bluesky (the company) are committed to interoperability with their respective protocols; to giving users control over their own experiences by using user agents (clients) of their own choosing; and to giving users access to their own content. Those are the foundations for any kind of bridging or cross-protocol interactivity, and at least from my perspective they are solidly in place. I'm personally pretty excited about multi-protocol clients and simple syndication bridges (eg, for public broadcast usecases). The work @snarfed and others are doing on bridging is great. I think that working out identity, privacy, and safety invariants across protocols could be possible, but would be challenging. |
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Thank you both for the thoughtful responses, @snarfed and @bnewbold, I appreciate it. Broadly speaking, my understanding is that both Mastodon and BlueSky are positioning themselves as public benefit projects -- Mastodon explicitly as a nonprofit, BlueSky with leadership by a PBLLC. I hope this public benefit orientation will lead us to a social web that strikes a good balance for users and isn't a zero-sum game. Beyond Mastodon, the ask for interoperability is likely to get louder if Threads follows through on its promise of implementing ActivityPub. I think it would be helpful to users of all three platforms if interoperability goals could be made as explicit as possible, even if they are very narrowly scoped to begin with.
A project-level commitment to support read-only consumption of updates from ActivityPub accounts (without needing two logins) would be a great start upon which to iterate, IMO. This would already help for many use cases, such as public sector accounts for emergency services, as well as news site accounts.
No question. I hope down the road, the idea of a cross-project task force to examine such questions may become viable. In the meantime, even modest gains will help the users of both platforms, and signal that we're building the social web together and not apart. |
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Assuming Threads becomes a major player in the social media game. I personally don't think so, because everyone I know of who made a Threads account no longer uses it. Nonetheless, I get your point, and none of what I said actually matters in this case. |
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A simple interop MVP I don’t see mentioned a lot is the ability to fully embed an apub/atproto post on its opposite platform. This would allow for a kind of quote-posting across networks. Like if I posted this link in a Bluesky post: https://mastodon.social/@pfefferle/111217236362579201 ..then it should be possible to display that as an oEmbed. If that could somehow be combined with a WebMention to inform me that my apub post has been shared elsewhere (and vice versa), we’d have significantly greater cross-border connectivity than the status quo. |
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That is a concrete suggestion that seems doable. The WebMentions could be generated for the entire atproto network by a service that consumes the global firehose (less coordination/adoption, more centralized), or by PDS or AppView implementations. Going the other way (ActivityPub mention of an atproto record results in atproto back-notification) might be harder. Atproto requires a record in a repo for things like mentions and backlinks; it isn't clear which or where such a mention record should be created for an inbound WebMention. Perhaps the PDS could create an inbound mention record in the "target" repo itself? |
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Nice! Fwiw https://fed.brid.gy/ is a multi-protocol bridge, and already supports webmention + microformats2, the latter being just as important as the former. You could send a webmention with a source page on a public bluesky client, but if that client doesn't server-side render HTML that includes microformats2, webmention receivers won't be able to do much with the source other than say, "hey, this page linked to us." Native is always nicer than bridge when possible though! Happy for BF to serve as a proof of concept and answer any q's when the time comes. |
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I like this idea as a first step. |
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As a ActivityPub user, I’d very much want to have support to like, reply, get replied to, and see BlueSky posts, while I don’t care if they don’t see non-reply ActivityPub posts. Failure to bridge it with the greater ActivityPub will lead to a “digital apartheid” of sorts, just like how social media is today closed down. |
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not sure what you mean by Apartheid here |
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A “digital wall” planted that separates primarily fediverse users from
being able to read and communicate with atproto users.
…On Wednesday, November 22, 2023, Slashscreen ***@***.***> wrote:
not sure what you mean by Apartheid here
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Or pubsubhubbub ? |
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I'm a big fan of both Bluesky and Mastodon/Fediverse so I would definitely like to see some sort of integration, if only to keep from having to segregate my followers between two different platforms. I think the implosion of Twitter kind of showed us how fragmentation of social networks is bad. Even if it's not full integration, some sort of ability to read and share posts between the two would be great. |
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This post on the ATProtocol Dev Blog interviewing the author of Bridgy Fed (@snarfed who commented above) says:
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I'm not a dev or programmer, just dropping by to say that I'm not fussed in the short-medium term, but in the long run, given the scale at which ActivityPub is already being used (such as on Lemmy/Kbin, PixelFed, now Flipboard, even Tumblr seems to be working towards it), my worry is that without gradual process towards interoperability we could just end up with two mutually exclusive protocols, and also that ATProto/Bluesky could get left behind due to mass early adoption of ActivityPub. |
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Hi. I'm a nobody to this project, but I'm concerned about the future of the internet, which I hope open, democratic platforms like these will improve. Currently, I am a user of ActivityPub platforms, and I would prefer not to join Bluesky or an AT-powered platform at this moment. I find interoperability between these platforms important, and almost critical, as I see Bluesky/AT increase in popularity. The internet does not need more segmentation, and the Fediverse was meant to give us the good parts of segmentation without the bad parts. AT and AP do not and should not need to compete for users. As a user of ActivityPub platforms, I would very much enjoy being able to interact with users on Bluesky and other AT powered platforms. I urge the developers of the AT protocol to consider interoperability, at least at the basic level, more important. |
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That’s what I’m saying. No AP integration will just fragment us.
…On Wednesday, February 7, 2024, mount2010 ***@***.***> wrote:
Hi. I'm a nobody to this project, but I'm concerned about the future of
the internet, which I hope open, democratic platforms like these will
improve. Currently, I am a user of ActivityPub platforms, and I would
prefer not to join Bluesky or an AT-powered platform at this moment. I find
interoperability between these platforms important, and almost critical, as
I see Bluesky/AT increase in popularity. The internet does not need more
segmentation, and the Fediverse was meant to give us the good parts of
segmentation without the bad parts. AT and AP do not and should not need to
compete for users.
As a user of ActivityPub platforms, I would very much enjoy being able to
interact with users on Bluesky and other AT powered platforms. I urge the
developers of the AT protocol to consider interoperability, at least at the
basic level, more important.
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I think this is a fascinating and important issue. I, personally, would be pleased with read-only access to BlueSky content. Since the decline of Twitter / X, several academic accounts that I follow to find out about events, calls for papers and new publications have moved to BlueSky while I am a Mastodon user by conviction. I do not necessarily need to respond to the accounts on BlueSky -- I just don't want to miss out on their posts. I think this is pretty representative of academic social media usage more generally. But aside from personal experience, I would like to share the following article on the SkyBridge tool that allows BlueSky users access to some Mastodon apps but, according to the author, also permits "accessing Bluesky feeds via the Mastodon lists screen": https://joeross.me/2023/06/26/skybridge-is-a.html Have any of you got more insights? |
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Not related but kinda related: https://snarfed.org/2024-02-12_52106 (A guy developed a bridge between Fediverse and Bluesky) Website related too: |
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If you are looking just to follow top-level posts (not replies) from bsky accounts, and have them show up in mastodon, you should be able to cobble this together today using the public bsky RSS feeds (per account; RSS URL is in the HTML metadata on public bsky.app account profile views) and activitypub tools like RSS Parrot. |
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I'm working on transmogrifying fediverse posts to Bluesky using the RSS feed function (in Mastodon, and probably other Fediverse servers). Rather relevant for this conversation is an observation that ActivityPub, Mastodon, and other fediverse server software can do more on their side to promote interoperability. Not only to ATproto, but also within ActivityPub. For example, take content warnings. The RSS feed structure doesn't have a field for content warnings; it is scrambled into the main text post. To grok it, the html text field of the RSS feed has to be parsed specially. Which is a bit of a pain and a back-[]ssward 'feature'. |
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Commented on the other comment before mine but i'm going to make other post to be more visible. https://snarfed.org/2024-02-12_52106 (A guy developed a bridge between Fediverse and Bluesky) Website related too: |
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no need to make it more visible, he's already the first reply in this discussion ;) |
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Idle thought: for everyone here interested in AT Protocol <=> ActivityPub interop, a fun weekend project would be to write a set of lexicons for ActivityStreams 2 activities and objects! |
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Yup! See also: https://berjon.com/ap-at/ And DSNP uses some subset of ActivityStreams as part of their protocol, might be worth checking out how they did things: https://spec.dsnp.org/ |
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Threads has begun rolling out ActivityPub support to more users. Bluesky users would benefit from being able to follow people on Threads and vice-versa. |
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Yes! Would love to see it. It would only help both Bsky and Threads grow now that Twitter is dead. |
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Making some progress on overlapping identity tech: |
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What are the current plans from BlueSky (the company) for interoperability with Mastodon/ActivityPub?
We currently have two emerging alternatives to X that deserve to be taken seriously: the fediverse and BlueSky. The fediverse tends to attract folks who highly value open source in principle and practice; BlueSky tends to attract folks who are looking for a drop-in Twitter replacement.
In this context, I would argue that a clear commitment from the key parties (that includes @Gargron's Mastodon gGmbH and Bluesky the company) towards an interoperable social web is essential. We should be able to follow each other no matter where we decide to make our social media home. Even Mark Zuckerberg's Threads has at least made a commitment towards interoperability.
Is Bluesky (the company) willing to make such a commitment or has it already done so in venues where I've not seen it? The last comment from anyone associated with the company I've been able to find is this from @pfrazee here in November 2022:
Is that still all that can be said? Even a clear commitment that has not yet been translated into the roadmap would be highly valuable at this stage.
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