Bridges
While there are millions of active Mastodon users and great diversity in the people and organizations that participate in the Fediverse, others may participate in different decentralized network like Bluesky or Nostr which do not use ActivityPub as their federation protocol.
One option is to follow such accounts on other networks using a bridge.
There are a few issues here:
- While some people may intend to follow accounts from another network through a bridge and understand the limitations, these accounts end up federated and searchable by anyone else on the server.
- These bridges may not respect the original author's privacy or require them to opt-out of federation, republishing without the original author's permission or consent.
- There can be inconsistency in behaviors when bridged accounts are interacted with (followed/unfollowed, replied to, boosted, liked, etc.)
- Creates a single point of failure between networks, bridge implementations may not respond properly because they are overloaded or incorrectly implemented.
Protocol Level
Protocol level bridging is generally prohibited on vmst.io. We do not connect to these services or allow our users' posts to be accessed through these services.
Bluesky
Bluesky intends to be a decentralized and federated service, but using their own AT Protocol instead of ActivityPub.
At this time, we have defederated from the known Bluesky bridge that is being developed, brid.gy.
Nostr
Nostr is another decentralized and federated service that uses their own protocol instead of ActivityPub.
At this time, we have defederated from the known Nostr bridges in operation, based on Mostr.
Republishing
Services which provide republishing of content from other services are allowed to federate, but with some restrictions.
These services provide a "bot-like" account that may appear to be a native ActivityPub-enabled account, consumable in Mastodon. Likes and replies with the person running the source account are visible to other vmst.io users, but are not sent back and are never seen by the author. Boosts are shared to your followers, and visible to them only if they are on servers that do not block them.
Sources for republished content may be from RSS-feeds, X-Twitter, Instagram, or centralized services.
X-Twitter
From our start in 2022 through late 2024, we blocked federation with applications like bird.makeup.
After re-evaluating this policy, we now allow limited federation with these types of platforms so they can be directly added by a user.
No vmst.io user data is ever shared with X-Twitter.
Similar to our policy on X-Twitter, there is a deployment called kilogram.makeup.