Bridgy Fed

Bridgy Fed connects IndieWeb sites with Mastodon and the fediverse. You can think of it like a POSSE and backfeed service for those servers, except that it federates instead of syndicating. Under the covers, it translates h-entry+Webmentions to/from ActivityPub.

A developers-centric summary of Bridgy Fed:

Bridgy Fed converts your existing site’s h-card profile, h-entry post permalinks, and Webmentions to ActivityPub, and vice versa.

How it works

One key difference between Bridgy Fed and POSSE/PESOS is that Bridgy Fed federates instead of syndicating. Fediverse implementations like Mastodon understand that your profile and posts live on your site, not as copies under a separate Mastodon user, so they link to your site properly.

Why

You want to federate your web site with the fediverse for the same reasons you POSSE, PESOS, or backfeed to any other silo: you want to own your data, but you also want to interact with people inside that silo.

How to

See https://fed.brid.gy/docs for general information on how to setup Bridgy Fed.

How to add a follow form

Your Bridgy Fed dashboard page has a form for others put their fediverse profile URL or @-@ address to follow you.

You can extract this markup and put it on your own site too!

People that have done this:

Anthony Ciccarello as of 2023-01-19 (See /subscribe)
Tantek Çelik as of 2023-01-20 on his home page right column: https://tantek.com
gRegor Morrill as of 2023-01-20 (See /follow)
Jamie Tanna as of 2023-02-12 on his /subscribe/ page
...

Steps to make this work:

Copy the form html from your site's profile on Bridgy Fed to somewhere on your site
Change the URL for the form action to be an absolute URL:
- https://fed.brid.gy/remote-follow
Adjust classes, labels, and placeholders as desired

Here’s a summary of the HTML form.

replace @tantek.com@tantek.com with your @-@, and
replace tantek.com with your domain

<form method="post" action="https://fed.brid.gy/remote-follow">
 <label for="follow-address">🐘 Follow 
  <kbd>@tantek.com@tantek.com</kbd>:<br /> 
  enter your @-@ fediverse address:</label>
 <input id="follow-address" name="address" type="text" required="required"
        placeholder="@you@instance.social" alt="fediverse address" value="" />
 <input name="domain" type="hidden" value="tantek.com" />
 <input name="protocol" type="hidden" value="web" />
 <button type="submit">Follow</button>
</form>

Sample rendering:

Entering a Mastodon @-@ address that you’re logged into (in this case @t@xoxo.zone) and clicking "Follow" will result in a screen like this:

Clicking "FOLLOW" on that screen completes the follow action, and should show a success message like this:

Stats

See: https://fed.brid.gy/stats

IndieWeb Examples

Ryan Barrett

Started using Bridgy Fed to federate with Mastodon and Hubzilla at the beginning of September 2017.

Federating a reply

Here's an example reply to a post on Mastodon:

And here's how it shows up inside Mastodon. Note that the permalink links back to snarfed.org, not inside Mastodon.

Backfeed

Here's another reply from inside Mastodon:

And here it is backfed to the original post on my site:

Tantek

Tantek Çelik setup Bridgy Fed on his site tantek.com on 2022-10-28.

Discoverability via search in Mastodon:

Screenshot of a Mastodon search results page showing "Tantek Çelik" with address @tantek.com@tantek.com and profile image in a "People" tab, and icon button to the right of the result to add/follow.

What a profile looks like in Mastodon after supporting Bridgy Fed:

Screenshot of a Mastodon view of a profile from Bridgy Fed, showing 0 posts, in stark contrast to how feed readers immediately show all recent posts from a feed when you subscribe to a feed.

Alex Kearney

kongaloosh setup Bridgy Fed on their site kongaloosh.com on 2022-11-04:

@kongaloosh.com@kongaloosh.com

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill set up Bridgy Fed via gregorlove.com 2022-11-15. I've successfully received a couple follow requests and sent several myself, which now appear on the following / followers pages linked from https://fed.brid.gy/user/gregorlove.com

Screenshot of my original photo post appearing in Mastodon with links and person tags (though not to Mastodon URLs)

Screenshot of how an article post appears. Only the title and link is shown. The fed.brid.gy link under the title is a Mastodon oddity (see GitHub issue), but that URL redirects to the original post:

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://gregorlove.com/2023/01/farewell-fail-whale/

The link preview under that fed.brid.gy link is a direct link to the original post:

https://gregorlove.com/2023/01/farewell-fail-whale/

Jamie Tanna

Jamie Tanna set up Bridgy Fed on 2022-11-05 and has both been receiving and sending follows, visible on his user page

Anthony Ciccarello

Anthony Ciccarello set up Bridgy Fed on 2022-11-10 and adjusted his user name to be @anthony@ciccarello.me. Mastodon users can follow using a form from his subscribe/ page.

Add yourself!

Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

History

Ryan Barrett had been thinking about the idea for Bridgy Fed for years, and then...

2017-06-24: Ryan Barrett, AJ Jordan, Johannes Ernst, and User:Sebastian.kip.pe discuss the idea at 2017/ostatusbridge.
2017-08-07: Ryan Barrett writes up design docs for ActivityPub and OStatus.
2017-08-13: Ryan Barrett starts coding Bridgy Fed.
2018-09-04: Ryan Barrett federates the first (ugly) IndieWeb post to Mastodon and to Hubzilla (instance now down as of 2017-11 ish).
2017-10-22: Ryan Barrett launches Bridgy Fed publicly.

Bridgy Fed

Contents

How it works

Why