I am currently working on a crossplatform browser for the fediverse, which will allow you to unify identities from mastodon, bluesky, and anywhere else across the open/decentralized social web into a single feed for easy browsing and management. It will also serve as a highly customizable and feature rich fediverse client, allowing profile and client theme customization, as well as groups, rss subscriptions, and several other features I’ve yet to fully flesh out.
Things to note:
- This is a pre-alpha project, and just seeking some very initial feedback on the very broad strokes of what is planned and what is done so far. If you are interested in collaboration and furthering the development of the project, please feel free to reach out.
- Features such as groups (i.e. federating with the threadiverse such as lemmy/piefed) or rss subscriptions are not implemented yet, it’s just a basic unified feed for bluesky/mastodon at the moment.
- This is not a live site that can be visited yet, it’s just an app on your client that authorizes access to the various platforms through oAuth flows. However, the plan is to eventually have a dedicated server hosting infrastructure in place, with individual platform identities able to be registered on a unified instance, and local/self-hosting data storage options.
So, please provide any and all feedback you have on what I have shown above, both good and bad, and feel free to ask clarifying questions on how the platform will work overall. Open to hearing what people think of the idea overall.
Fair criticism, I understand the sentiment. I know there are a lot of problems with bluesky, and one might want to distance themselves from the platform as much as possible, but the reality is that a lot of people use it, and it is the primary form of communication they have that is capable of federation.
The method of federation is seamless, but notably, it is also completely optional. Just like the rest of the fediverse, if you don’t opt in to seeing the content from a bluesky user, you won’t. It is based on a bluesky identity, so if you just never link ones you will never connect to bluesky in any way.
Furthermore, the platform utilizes did:web, a w3c standard that allows the unification of identities under a single url based identity (I.e., did:web:quokka.au:lumpenproletariat) whose did document can list any number of aka identities for that user. That can include a bluesky identity, or it can be any fediverse identity such as pixelfed, piefed, Lemmy, etc. Bluesky is not an integral part of the project overall, it is just a first test at cross platform federation. Your federation choices are your own.
Also, I mean, if people don’t like it they don’t have to use bluseky to use the app you’ve made.🤷♀️ It doesn’t really change that some people out there might like to use both.