Decentered S1E3: Ryan Barrett Has a Bridge to Sell Us
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Ryan Barrett is an exceedingly rare bird in the Fediverse space. He co-founded Google AppEngine, which became a big part of Google’s Cloud infrastructure, before moving on to companies such as Color and NCX to deal with early cancer detection systems, and a carbon offset marketplace, respectively.
Ryan has long held an interest in peer-to-peer systems over the years, and has explored a variety of federated protocols in a hopes of bridging them all together with Bridgy Fed.
Show Notes
- The reason Sean laughed when Ryan said “I love the show” was that we had only released two episodes prior to this interview! We actually record and edit episodes non-stop, but we have a huge backlog to get through.
- Bridgy started out as a way for Ryan to bring his comments and interactions from other social networks onto his blog, where his posts originated from.
- Prior to building in federation support, the original Bridgy was founded on IndieWeb principles and technologies.
- Out of the protocols he currently works with: IndieWeb is easy and flexible, Nostr is easy but messy, ActivityPub is harder and less flexible, and Bluesky’s AT Protocol is hardest and most opinionated.
- How does Bridgy Fed work, exactly? It natively speaks multiple protocols, and translates activities and objects back and forth.
- Latest feature: you can follow any website that has an RSS/Atom feed, and it will automatically create a multi-protocol bot that will translate into native posts.
- A standardized testing suite would make Ryan’s job a lot easier, right now he has to spin up a variety of servers to see where things break down.
- “Standard Profiles” for Fediverse test suites that demonstrate a handful of features and capabilities might be a good way to test for particular kinds of compatibility
- Interoperability is often a virtue in the Fediverse, but sometimes people will try to shoehorn in compatibility in unexpected places.
- Ryan posted his thoughts recently about cross-protocol moderation. “When we decide that I want to interact with these people but not those other people, it’s because of the people themselves, not because their server is running WordPress or talking AT Protocol…”
