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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Every time federation comes up, I always ask where the bridges are that allow "following" people on the non-federated sites (e.g. Twitter), and the answer is always vague and non-specific, suggesting that such bridges exist without any information about using them.

I'd love to see a switching guide for, say, Twitter, that specifically says "here's how to transparently follow people on Twitter, and here's how to have your posts show up on your old Twitter account". Or similarly, if you're switching from Instagram, how do you follow folks from Instagram and automatically post to Instagram?

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Perhaps you have misunderstood the purpose and implementation of federating sites like these?

Your question sounds like someone asking how a user of a newly opened Facebook account can follow people on Twitter. They're entirely different services. The federating, or not, is immaterial.

The first part is the alternative service.

Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, presented in a Twitter-like format and flow. People who use it do so because they want to avoid the restrictions and cultures of Twitter. They don't want to post the same content across the two services. They don't want to interact with Twitter. They want to be on Mastodon.

The second part is the federating of the service.

Instances of Mastodon are spread around, hosting a set of users on their individual servers. Each of those instances can then communicate between with the others, intending for you to be able to follow and interact with users on other Mastodon server instances as transparently as those of your local Mastodon server. They are still interacting within the Mastodon environment.

> Perhaps you have misunderstood the purpose and implementation of federating sites like these?

No, I absolutely understand how federating sites work, and don't need the condescension.

It's common, in many types of federated reimplementations of non-federated sites, to create special-case bridges that allow treating a large non-federated site as if it were following the federation protocol, precisely to help people migrate and to continue interoperating with users who are on the non-federated site.

In the specific case of ActivityPub, there are multiple bridges that allow following Twitter users as if they were part of the fediverse. Multiple Mastodon users I know have mentioned them. People just don't talk about them very clearly, or document them in migration guides. Hence my comment suggesting that.

If specific portions of the fediverse want to avoid ever interacting with Twitter bridges, they can absolutely do that, just as they can avoid interacting with other portions of the fediverse. But it would be helpful if potential new users had some information they could use to migrate more smoothly.

Apologies. I didn't mean to sound condescending. It just seemed like a desire to do something so entirely at odds with the two approaches to online interaction (open, user controlled, non-hierarchical vs closed, corporate controlled and top down implementations) that it confused me.

"...so entirely at odds with..."

That sounds a bit like "why would you even want to run Photoshop on Unix? It's not open source! It's an entirely different philosophy!"

Many people balance different needs and values. Someone might like the idea of open federation but still need to follow people on Twitter for their day job, or simply follow a thousand interesting people that they don't want to simply drop just like that, to enter into a comparative wasteland.

Providing people with half-way solutions actually encourages more people to come and transition smoothly.

> People just don't talk about them very clearly, or document them

Because I am pretty sure it violates Twitter API use. Twitter has no incentive to allow data moving off their network.

> It's common, in many types of federated reimplementations of non-federated sites, to create special-case bridges that allow treating a large non-federated site as if it were following the federation protocol

The non-federated site has to play along with the federation standard for this to work. Just like Compuserve or AOL, which provided both proprietary "walled gardens" and (increasingly over time) interoperability with federated services like e-mail.

It doesn't have to play along; it just has to have enough of an API to extract the necessary information. The idea of the bridge is to translate between the standard everyone else speaks and the API of the big non-federated site most people use.

There is no bridge. I highly doubt the Twitter API TOS would even allow it. What you can do is get a client that supports both Mastodon as well as Twitter. I recommend Twidere on Android.

https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.mariotaku.twidere/

There sort of is although I don't know why anyone would want it.

https://github.com/renatolond/mastodon-twitter-poster

I actually have my twitter and mastodon accounts linked with this, but I assume a bridge like the other commenter requested would allow to follow any twitter acount from your Mastodon account.

Ah yes. You're right, certainly would be stopped by Twitter even if technically possible.

It doesn't seem likely that Instagram or Twitter is going to go away tomorrow. Posting to Twitter and Mastodon means that eventually there would be content and interactions building up over time.

There seem to be two problems with replacing Instagram or Twitter. The first one is money to run servers, fight spam, handle subpoenas, etc.

The other one is having an authoritative directory. How is anyone to know that "ClearAndPresent" on Twitter is the same as "ClearAndPresent@SomeRandomInstance.mastodon"? An obvious way would be to send a DM to a Twitter account but it seems likely that Twitter would shut that down pretty quickly. We've all heard the stories of Facebook (and LinkedIn and ...) pillaging Gmail for contacts.

After the recent LinkedIn scraping court rulings, it seems Twitter should be legally scrapable. Twitter is largely public content submitted by their users, which Twitter does not own. It’s plausible this is why Instagram removed public access.

yes, twitter should be legally scrapable.

however, no-one but google actually has the horsepower to do it. You'll be playing an arms race with their devOps team if you try at scale, because they'll say you're degrading service and that IS illegal.

so, while it's a nice legal victory, it's a moot one for things like twitter.

Bridges are a (very necessary) migratory tool, but you're never going to get perfect connectivity while living in a walled garden, because the whole point of a walled garden is to block connectivity and interoperability. The lack of good controls for cross-posting across Twitter/Facebook/Instagram is one of the central problems (no pun intended) that these federated services are solving.

Some bridges do exist (see Matrix connectors), and I agree that it should be a very high priority to add more of them and improve the existing connectors.

But it's also important to understand that, yes, they're messy, and will probably always be a little messy -- because the services they are connecting to don't play nicely with others. If Twitter had an amazing 3rd-party API that anyone could use to write a custom client, view content, export data, and filter posts, then it wouldn't be as big of a priority to get off of Twitter.

However, all of that being said, I too would like to see more guides here. I spent a long time following Matrix before I realized there were public Discord bridges that could be used without even hosting my own server.[0] I just never saw it mentioned anywhere.

The publicity/documentation around this stuff could improve a lot.

[0]: https://t2bot.io/

With enough users behind it, social media sites would see the need to integrate into the federation instead of remaining walled.

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