Bridgy Fed status update time! It’s been a busy couple weeks. I’m happy to report that I’ve made solid progress on three of my four goals from last time – reliability, delays, and bugs – and improved a number of other things along the way. Here’s a sampling:

- Switched Bluesky => fediverse from polling to firehose. This made it way less flaky, and cut the 5-15m delay down to just seconds.
- Fixed fediverse => Bluesky getting stuck for many accounts. I took some shortcuts in my Bluesky infrastructure, and they came back to bite me. Still work left to do, but the user-visible issues should be largely fixed.
- Various issues with finding the bot accounts, following them, and getting bridging started.
- Fixed images in Bluesky => fediverse posts.
- Implemented deleting posts, Bluesky => fediverse. (Fediverse => Bluesky was already working.)
- Fixed flakiness bridging replies, both directions.
- Fixed links, mentions, and hashtags, both directions. Still some broken bits here, notably Bluesky => fediverse mentions, but otherwise these should be much better now.
- First pass at spam filtering. Sigh.

Apart from the firehose, one notable area I haven’t focused on yet is infrastructure. It’s scaling ok so far, but it could be a lot better, and a lot more efficient. I’ll need to work on that soon. If you see a bit of time go by without many user-visible improvements, that’s probably what’s happening.

Otherwise, thanks for all the feedback and questions and bug reports! Please do keep them coming. As always, you can follow the now label in GitHub to see what I’m focusing on. See you on the bridge!

Phew! It’s been quite a few days, Bridgy Fed is up to almost 2500 bridged accounts total. Thanks again for all of your interest! I’ve been in a constant state of whiplash, back and forth between hearing “this is so cool!” and “it’s broken in these 10 different ways.”

I love that you all are enjoying it! And it absolutely is broken in all of those ways, and more. I’m sorry. I’d planned on a bit more time to iron out bugs first, but c’est la vie. Testing in production! 🤷

I’m seeing most of the problems break down into four broad buckets, which I’m tackling in this order:

- Bridging stuff from Bluesky to the fediverse is flaky and unreliable. True. This is largely because it’s currently based on polling. I’m in the middle of switching it to the Bluesky firehose; that should hopefully be complete within a day or two.
- Bridging stuff from the fediverse to Bluesky sometimes stops working. True. Bridgy Fed isn’t as rigorous about validating Bluesky records as it needs to be, so when we emit an invalid record in one user’s repo, I suspect the Bluesky relay gets stuck and won’t accept any more for that user. Fixing some parts of this may be tricky, but it’s still very fixable.
- Lots of things don’t translate right, or at all. True. This is annoying, but seems lower priority than the unreliability buckets, and most of these bugs are straightforward to fix, so I’m focusing on reliability first.
- Scaling is inefficient and expensive. True. OK, I’m the only one seeing this, but it’s still true. 😎 Fortunately I’m not too worried, since I’m confident I’ll be able to optimize it. Make it work, then make it right, then make it fast (and cheap), in that order.

I’ll continue to post updates here now and then. You can also follow the now label on Bridgy Fed’s GitHub issues to see what I’m focusing on at any given moment. Thanks again for all of the interest, and for your patience. It’ll get better, one step at a time.

Fediverse! I’ve been building a bridge to Bluesky, and they’re turning on federation soon, which means my bridge will be available soon too. You’ll be able to follow people on Bluesky from here in the fediverse, and vice versa.

Bluesky is a broad network with lots of worthwhile people and conversations! I hope you’ll give it a chance. Only fully public content is bridged, not followers-only or otherwise private posts or profiles. Still, if you want to opt out, I understand. Feel free to DM me at @snarfed@indieweb.social (different account than this one), email me, file a GitHub issue, or put #nobridge in your profile bio.

A number of us have thought about this for a while now, we’re committed to making it work well for everyone, and we’re very open to feedback. Thanks for listening. Feel free to share broadly.

cc @activitypubblueskybridge @fedidevs @fediversenews

Brief Bridgy Fed status update: I spent last week on other things, but I got back in the saddle this week and got Bluesky => fediverse follows and fediverse => Bluesky posts working!

The usual caveat applies: this is in the Bluesky federation sandbox, not prod, until they turn on federation there. Hopefully early next year!

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, cc @activitypubblueskybridge@venera.social.