@small patatas Based on what I read, it sounded like there is no mirroring. It simply converts from one protocol to another and passes on the request.

If you are on ActivityPub and follow someone on Bluesky, your follow request gets sent to the bridge, which converts it to the other protocol, and sends the follow request to the Bluesky server. The Bluesky server then starts sending posts to the bridge addressed to you, and the bridge reformats it and it appears in your ActivityPub app.

So you are actually following the Bluesky channel, not an ActivityPub copy of a Bluesky channel.

There is no mirror. There are no duplicate accounts on each side. You speak English and the translator app spits out Spanish. That's all the bridge does. Translates from one protocol to another.

@FreeSchool=Learn Respect Love A very good article about the situation was written by @Sean Tilley at @We Distribute and you can find it here:

Tear Down Walls, and Build Bridges

Recently, Ryan Barrett re-announced his Bridgy Fed project to the Fediverse. As a service, it's designed wih one specific goal in mind: to make parts of the decenralized social web that speak differen

^{Sean Tilley (We Distribute)}

@FreeSchool=Learn Respect Love

I think it's a good way to educate actually, and could you reply again what you would reply typically to your own post if someone asked "ok so how is it if not that?" since I / they would be ready to hear at that point

Let's see if I can make this halfway understandable. But it's going to be looooooooong.

First of all, Bluesky only knows what's being delivered to it. Not by BridgyFed. By Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse through BridgyFed. BridgyFed does not scrape any information itself. Neither does Bluesky, also because it can't do that through Bluesky.

No, really. No, no, really. Calm down.

No, Bluesky won't have your profile and your posts right off the bat. In fact, Bluesky won't have any of the posts you've posted until now unless someone with at least one Bluesky follower boosts one of your old posts. And even only then, Bluesky will only have that one single post.

So what does Bluesky get from you then?

Well, normally, nothing. No, really.

At first, Bluesky won't even know you exist, much less where. Again, BridgyFed is not a scraper, and Bluesky doesn't have a Fediverse scraper either. And even if it had one, it wouldn't work through BridgyFed because BridgyFed doesn't support that.

And seriously: If Bluesky really wanted to scrape the Fediverse, it wouldn't do that through that tiny third-party keyhole that's BridgyFed! It'd set up search crawlers like Google that crawl Fediverse instances and send everything they find to Bluesky.

But Bluesky doesn't do that. I can reassure you that Bluesky doesn't do that.

Because Bluesky isn't interested in the Fediverse.

No, really, it isn't. If it were, it would have used ActivityPub right away instead of developing a wholly new and incompatible protocol. Or it could at least have included its own ActivityPub "translators" just like Hubzilla and (streams) have them and like Friendica used to have until it switched to ActivityPub.

But does Bluesky support ActivityPub in any way? No, it doesn't. Even though ActivityPub would have made a whole lot of things a whole lot easier for Bluesky itself already, it doesn't. Go figure.

Which goes to show that Bluesky isn't interested in the Fediverse. Bluesky doesn't want your data. And, again, if it did, it wouldn't rely on a third-party bridge to get them.

Okay, so again, what does Bluesky get from you?

Again, nothing. At least at first.

Now, let's suppose someone with at least one Bluesky follower mentions you in a public post. That public post also goes to that Bluesky follower, thus to Bluesky, with a link to your profile in it.

Then Bluesky has your name, and it has the URL of your profile. No different from how Mastodon works.

But it doesn't go through that link and scrape all your profile information. It isn't interested in that.

And besides, Mastodon profiles or any other Fediverse profiles are probably completely and utterly incompatible with Bluesky's profile structure anyway. So all that stuff would have to be "translated to Blueskyish". Extra effort for something that Bluesky isn't even interested in. Again, if it were, don't you think it'd use ActivityPub instead of their own AT protocol? Yeah, but it doesn't.

So from when on will Bluesky know your profile?

Normally, not at all.

Only when someone from Bluesky wants to follow you. And you've either got your profile set up so that anyone can follow you without your explicit consent. Or you actively confirm that follow request.

Then you're connected to Bluesky.

And only then will Bluesky know you. As in know your profile. Or what profile information makes it through BridgyFed in the first place. And what of it Bluesky has a way of handling. Maybe not more than your profile picture and your profile text. All stuff that's public anyway, and that Google might have scraped a gajillion times already.

But it will not have your whole backlog of posts.

I mean, if you start following another Mastodon user who has been here for four years, you won't get four years worth of their old posts piled upon your timeline either, right? Or has that ever occurred to you? I guess not.

This is not only because Bluesky doesn't do that. This is because Mastodon doesn't do that. It doesn't send any old posts to new followers, and it doesn't request old posts from new followers.

Let me show this to you from somewhere else in the Fediverse.

I'm on Hubzilla. Hubzilla supports importing old posts to a certain degree. If I follow someone on Hubzilla or (streams), I think, also on Friendica, I get their 10 latest posts into my stream. And I get them as new posts. The perk of this is that I can interact with fairly certain posts that only connections are allowed to interact with (yes, that's possible here) by connecting to the poster.

Also, if I subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed, depending on the feed, I get a certain number of old posts.

But if I connect to someone on Mastodon, I don't get even a single one of their old posts. Because Mastodon doesn't support that.

I don't get their ten latest posts, and I don't get their whole post history either or what's left of it after auto-deletion.

If Hubzilla which supports such stuff doesn't get them, then Bluesky won't get them either. Regardless of what Bluesky may or may not want, and regardless of what BridgyFed is or isn't capable of. Mastodon won't send them, full stop.

The only posts from you that Bluesky will ever get are your public posts which you send after letting someone on Bluesky follow you. And public posts from you that someone with at least one Bluesky follower boosts.

And "public" really means "public". Just because you're on Mastodon and no longer on Twitter, doesn't mean you're in a fully safe haven and fully shielded from the world outside Mastodon. Yes, that's an uncomfortable truth if you've believed otherwise up until now, but it's the truth. Deal with it. You'd have to deal with it sooner or later anyway.

Seriously, what the Fediverse desperately needs is 10-minute videos from a true Fediverse expert, done in the style of "Academic expert explains science like I'm 5 years old" videos with colourful animations, that explain the Fediverse to journalists as well as to fresh or aspiring 𝕏 converts.

And that would take someone who

• really knows the whole Fediverse inside-out, all the way into its deepest nooks and crannies
• still doesn't only "speak dev" or "speak admin" and can actually make things understandable to your average tech-illiterate 𝕏 user with only a phone
• can make such animations
• can also make these videos fully accessible, not only with a verbatim transcript, but, if necessary, with additional real-time audio descriptions that optionally tell blind or visually-impaired users what happens on-screen, even if what happens on-screen only serves as illustrations for the explanations

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Bluesky #Bridge #BridgyFed #BlueskyBridge

Content warning: Bluesky doesn't do as much as people might think / fear... [how it works / explained] Reveal/hide

@FreeSchool=Learn Respect Love

So I'm happy with that explanation and seems like you've put yourself in with half a chance to do such a small video and even prepped it now!
Even this as audio with pics... even here native... I'd listen (not sure elsewhere if I'd click).

So as side-note I'll be happy to help you produce such a thing and even invite you to send similar points by audio (your text above as script already pretty much lol) and I'll arrange it and send back to you complete!

I'm not going to produce any videos. That'd be way too much of an effort, especially meeting Mastodon's accessibility standards plus my own standards.

If this sounds weird, allow me to elaborate.

This is not a general-purpose personal channel. This channel is mainly about 3-D virtual worlds. I sometimes post pictures from these virtual worlds. But whenever I do that, I add an image description that's amongst the longest and most extensive anywhere in the Fediverse. I have to put the image description into the post text itself for several reasons, one reason being that they're too long for alt-text. Not only does Mastodon only support alt-text up to 1,500 characters internally, it also cuts off any alt-text from outside that's longer. And mine are longer.

I think I have very good reasons for writing such long image descriptions.

I've actually thought about making in-world videos one day and uploading them to PeerTube. I've decided against it. Accessibility would make it too much of an effort, and it'd make the videos essentially unwatchable. I'd include an audio description that describes the visuals in the videos on at least the same level of detail as my image descriptions.

So with an audio description added, the video would have to pause every few seconds for several minutes to give me some time to describe what's on-screen at that point, or what has just appeared on-screen, and explain it if necessary. If I didn't stop the video, the audio would not have a chance to catch up with the ever-changing visuals.

Imagine this:

• Two and a half seconds of actually moving pictures.
• Voiceover describes the camera movement.
• A building comes into view.
• Video stops.
• Voiceover describes the building and explains what needs to be explained to someone who doesn't know anything about anything in the video.
• Ten minutes later, the video starts moving again.

The audio description would inflate a ten-minute video to something between six and ten hours.

Okay, now, a video about the Fediverse would not be a video about a virtual world that nobody knows. But still, I expect there to be blind or visually-impaired users who come across such a video, play it and wonder, "What is being shown on the screen? What does this video and all that stuff in it look like?"

I mean, the visuals wouldn't carry any additional information. They'd be purely illustrational. They wouldn't contribute any content to the explanation, only enhance it. Content-wise, the explanation would work all the same with and without these visuals.

But not describing them feels kind of ableist, kind of like not letting non-sighted people experience the video in the exact same way as sighted people. And I always expect there to be non-sighted people who want to have all visuals in a video described in audio.

So I might spend weeks making one 10-minute video which would then be inflated to 30 minutes or an hour by the audio description.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Accessibility #A11y #MediaDescription #AudioDescription

Description of Visual Information

Helps you understand and create description of visual information (called audio description, video description, or described video) for video accessibility.

^{W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) (Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI))}

Content warning: Teaching others about yourself, helps others enjoy with you and smoth over any gaps... Reveal/hide

@FreeSchool=Learn Respect Love Thanks for your offer, but I'm still not going to do anything in that direction.

But to answer this:

I would like to know what your goal is or even why... to enjoy that with you as mostly we are coming from these types of 'normal' video or ideas as a world but happy to see or hear more...

I had a number of ideas, but nothing with a script behind it. Present places by walking around in them and talking about them, about what I come by. Another idea was to review houses that you can pick up for your own use; I would have done that the same style, often even without knowing the building beforehand.

All of this would have been rather spontaneous with lots of on-screen movement, constant unscripted and largely unprepared talking, pretty much like a Let's Play.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost