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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 op

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.

JoshTriplett 7y ago
> 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.
- ClearAndPresent 7y ago
  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.
  - SamBam 7y ago
    "...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.
- hos234 7y ago
  > 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.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > 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.
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    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.

JoshTriplett 7y ago

> 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.

ClearAndPresent 7y ago
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.
- SamBam 7y ago
  "...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.
hos234 7y ago
> 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.
zozbot234 7y ago
> 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.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  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.