Hi all! I’m overdue for another Bridgy Fed status update. Bottom line up front: we’re now bridging video on Bluesky! Out from Bluesky works now, in will work as soon as they finish their user rollout, hopefully within days.

Also, Bridgy Fed can now ask people to bridge their accounts! This is the infamous “discoverable opt in,” and it’s finally launched. If you want to follow someone, but they’re not bridged, send their handle to Bridgy Fed in a DM or chat message, and it will message them to say you’re asking. (Only once; it won’t send another message if someone else asks.)

We send a couple other DMs now too, a welcome when you bridge your account, and an FYI when you reply to someone but they won’t see it because you’re not bridged .

It’s been a busy couple months. I was all set to post this weeks ago, after I put the finishing touches on DMs, but then Brazil happened. 3M new users and 10-20x usage increase in just a few days!

Amazingly, even though Bluesky team hosts all the difficult-to-scale parts themselves, not in the cloud, they’d still planned for this kind of surprise and handled it ok. Bridgy Fed though, not so much. It stayed up and serving, but Bluesky => fediverse got slower and slower. Tough timing, too, I was busy with other things and couldn’t find much time to work on it, so after a week it was almost 3 days (!) behind.

Fortunately, I finally managed to speed it up – props to Ilya‘s libipld library, among other things! – and after it worked through the backlog, we were back in business.

Anyway. Since last time: video, DMs, usage spike, and other features and bug fixes too:

• Improved Pleroma and Flipboard compatibility.
• Improved style of web => Bluesky bridged posts, also now try harder to include an image.
• Drastically improved monitoring and alerting.
• Stricter authorization for AP Undos.
• …and lots more bug fixes.

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