Bridgy Fed
Bridgy Fed connects IndieWeb sites with federated social networks like Mastodon and Hubzilla. You can think of it like a POSSE and backfeed service for those silos, except that it federates instead of syndicating. Under the covers, it translates Webmentions to/from ActivityPub and OStatus.
Contents
Why
You want to federate your web site with a fedsocnet 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 it works
One key difference between Bridgy Fed and POSSE/PESOS is that it federates instead of syndicating. Fedsocnets like Mastodon understand that your profile and posts live on your site, not inside Mastodon, so they link to your site properly.
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:
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.
As of 2018-01-11, Bridgy Fed has successfully federated ~50 posts between the IndieWeb and fedsocnets. Here are the 20 latest.
