Nick @internic@qoto.org

It’s time for a special holiday Bridgy Fed status update!

Since last time, we’ve been working mostly on getting A New Social off the ground and on Bridgy Fed internals. Specifically, my development focus for a while now has been cost cutting. I fund Bridgy Fed myself right now, which I’m happy to do, but it costs more to run than it should, probably by 2-3x or so.

(We do plan to fundraise for A New Social eventually and fund Bridgy Fed there instead! Including individual donations, among other sources. Stay tuned for more news when we have it.)

In the meantime, I’ve been pushing the optimization boulder uphill, making slow progress. I’m currently struggling with one big issue: getting caching working in ndb, our ORM.

ndb can cache both in memory and in memcache. We configure it to do both, but it doesn’t seem to be using memcache in production, and I’m not even sure it’s caching in memory there either. If you have experience with ndb, Google Cloud Datastore, Memorystore, or related tools, please take a look and let me know if you see anything obviously wrong!

This also means that I haven’t had much time to spend on features, bug fixes, or other user-visible updates. I’m the only developer on Bridgy Fed right now, and I’m only part time. I’d love help! It’s entirely open source, so if you’re interested, check out the open issues, feel free to dive in, and ping me on GitHub if you have any questions!

Having said that, I have done a bit besides cost cutting since last time:

Generate link previews (aka embeds) on Bluesky.
Launch Threads support! Just via normal ActivityPub, nothing special, but I worked with them a fair amount on interop.
Improve sign-up flow for web => Bluesky bridging.
Try harder to redirect fediverse @-mentions of bridged users to their web site or Bluesky profile.
Reduce confusion on the home page sign-up form by detecting web sites that are already fediverse instances.
Let fediverse accounts re-enable the bridge even if they disabled it before October.
Improve interop with Friendica, Hubzilla, Misskey/Sharkey, Sharkey, WordPress Friends plugin, and GoToSocial.
Improve authorization to prevent a cache poisoning attack.
Improve DNS scaling for Bluesky handles.
Populate the discoverable and indexable flags on bridged ActivityPub actors.
Misc bug fixes for web sites on www subdomains.
Fix rare bug where we occasionally missed bridging posts or other interactions to Bluesky.
Fix rare bug where we occasionally missed bridging deletes.
Continued debugging of accounts bridged into Bluesky that occasionally get stuck and stop bridging.
Lots of docs improvements.

As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports. You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!