Copying myself because I'm irritated yet again by people with their head up their ass assuming that their tiny view of the fediverse represents the whole and it's history...

This was set off by another person, yet again, complaining about bridgy-fed and thinking Snarfed is some untrustworthy asshole because he was following the actual norms and standards of the fediverse because the Twitter expats thought Mastodon was some bastion of personal control and ownership....

For context, opt-out (via just blocking the bridge) has been the norm since pretty much the beginning of federation... which the people complaining about the nature of the bridge don't realize how old federation and the community is.

For context (of the ones I'm aware of):
* The first federated protocol was introduced in 1980
* The first federated chat protocol was introduced in 1999
* The first federated social networking platforms that I know of started coming out about 2010. The platform I'm on (Friendica) came out that year.
* the second major federated chat protocol was introduced in 2014 and quickly bridges were built between it and the first (all only opt-out via blocking)
* Mastodon wasn't released until 2016, originally on the ostatus network (Friendica supported and still supports ostatus)
* Snarfed starts working on bridgy-fed around 2018
* Activitypub came out in 2018, mastodon and friendica both transitioned to Activitypub as their central protocol with Mastodon eventually dropping ostatus.
* Bridges were established between Activitypub and previous social networks, all opt-out bridges (and again via blocking)
* 2022 Elon Musk buys Twitter and do to good PR Mastodon becomes the instance platform of choice for most of them to the point that most of them think Mastodon is the network
* 2023, Snarfed has been writing bridgy fed for 7 years now, about as long as the activitypub network has existed, long predating Bluesky (because that's not the only bridge in the project), and all of a sudden people specifically overwhelmingly on Mastodon or younger projects think it's a deep offense to build something under the same social standards that have been the norm for decades. Even then long before the bluesky portion of the bridge was fully functional they relented and switched to an approach that drastically hampered has caused countless bugs and technical difficulties just because a minority of people decided to dogpile him... and of course he's judged because other people essentially crashed a party he'd been at peacefully for years and decided to scream that he was being inappropriate when everyone who was hear already supported it...

#bridges #bridgy #FediMeta #Fediverse #Bluesky