Bridgy Fed
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In the old Age of Sail style. A Lovecraftian giant octopus attacks three large sailing ships. The ships' sails have the Twitter, Reddit, and Threads logos. The octopos's tentacles have the webmention, ActivityPub, fediverse, ATProto, and Nostr logos. The octopus's head is a router with the Bridgy (Fed) logo.

Bridgy Fed connects IndieWeb sites with Mastodon & other fediverse instances, allowing those networks to follow your IndieWeb site, receive notifications of, read, and reply to your posts.

Bridgy Fed is 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:

Steps to make this work:

  1. Copy the form html from your site's profile on Bridgy Fed to somewhere on your site
  2. Change the URL for the form action to be an absolute URL:
    • https://fed.brid.gy/remote-follow
  3. 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:

2023-01-20-bf-at-at-follow-form.png

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:

2023-01-20-mastodon-follow-prompt.png

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

2023-01-20-mastodon-follow-success.png

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:

bridgy fed indieweb reply.jpg

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

bridgy fed mastodon post.jpg

Backfeed

Here's another reply from inside Mastodon:

bridgy fed mastodon reply.png

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

bridgy fed indieweb backfeed.jpg


Tantek

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

Discoverability via search in Mastodon:

2022-10-28-mastodon-follow-tantekcom.png 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:

2022-10-28-mastodon-tantekcom-profile.png 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

gRegor photo post

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

gregorlove-bridgy-fed-post-2022-11-20.png

gRegor article post

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:

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

gregorlove-bridgy-fed-article-2023-02-02.png

gRegor verfication

Screenshot of how verification appears. The representative h-card on my homepage has links to gregorlove.com and gregorlove.com/about/ with u-url properties. My homepage also has an invisible <link rel="me" href="https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://gregorlove.com/">. It appears that since fed.brid.gy is the delegated domain for my ActivityPub interactions, Mastodon is using that domain for rel-me verification.

This screenshot is from indieweb.social viewed as the public, found by searching "gregorlove.com". The verification checkmark does not appear on every instance for some reason -- perhaps caching?

indieweb-social-gregorlove-verified-2023-08-18.png

gRegor article with tags

Screenshot of my original article appearing in Mastodon hashtag search, with hashtags shown under the post. This appears to be new as of Mastodon v4.2.0 based on comparing hashtag search on a couple instances running earlier versions. These screenshots were taken on https://indieweb.social/tags/weeklyroundup (search) and on the post permalink, not signed in to Mastodon.

The hashtag search results page: bridgy-fed-article-hashtags-search-2023-09-24.png

The permalink for my federated post: bridgy-fed-article-hashtags-permalink-2023-09-24.png

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)

Testimonials

History

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

See Also

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