Bounce, bridging and language

Here's a sentence for you:

Bounce is a new cross-protocol social graph migration tool that uses a protocol bridging service to create an mirror account on the sending protocol, which simulates the effect of sending your social graph across protocols.

If you understand everything that's going on here, congratulations on also having open-social-web-brainworms.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that this is not everyone though.

The Bounce service launched in beta today, and I think there are multiple stories going on at the same time:

For an explanation of what this is, Sarah Perez at TechCrunch as a good article which makes explains it as follows:

To move accounts, Bounce first moves a user’s Bluesky account to a bridged account that straddles the two networks, then to the user’s Mastodon account. 

A New Social explains Bounce in more detail here:

An important feature with accounts on the open social web is that, as long as they're using the same protocol, you can technically "move" your account from one platform to another. For instance, since they both run on ActivityPub, if I have an account on mastodon.social, I can "move" my social graph from there to flipboard.social, if that's where I want to post from now on. That move maintains all of my relationships and allows me to continue posting without having to re-find my friends. You can do the same thing between ATProtocol-based platforms, such as Bluesky.

We're using that same functionality to "move" your accounts over Bridgy Fed. We take your Bluesky account and "move" it to your Mastodon profile's bridged account, and take your Bluesky profile's bridged account and "move" it into your Mastodon profile.

Credible Exit

Bluesky advertises itself with the idea of 'credible exit', the idea that you can meaningfully leave the service and take your social graph and data with you. Bluesky has mainly meant that in the context of ATProto:

Bounce adds an additional layer to this all:

In this way, the ability to use Bounce to migrate your social graph from Bluesky to Mastodon actually is a benefit to Bluesky: it further cements their claim of providing a credible exit. This lowers the barriers for people who are unsure about trying out Bluesky, there is now a way back.

Language and definitions

One challenge for Bounce, as well as Bridgy Fed, is the lack of shared references to help explain what this all actually is. Understanding why bridging software like Bridgy Fed matters, requires knowledge of how the open social web protocols work.

It creates new kinds of artefacts, such as 'mirrored' accounts on the bridge, which are a new concept that people are largely not familiar with. Furthermore, this type of account does not even have a good name to define what it actually is.

Recently I wrote about how decentralised networks lead to fragmentation and decentralisation in the underlying protocols that power them. People might see bridging as a temporary solution to a problem caused by developers with a Not Invented Here Syndrome. Instead, I see this fragmentation and protocols that are only partially compatible with each other as a logical result of giving people freedom to build and hack whatever they want. Sure, it leads to interoperability issues and it can be annoying, but it is also an unavoidable result from the social dynamics that are part of truly open networks.

That means that bridging services and other software that focuses on making incompatible software compatible with each other will be part of the open social web for a while longer. And that means that there is also a lot of work to be done regarding language and explanations of what these tools actually do, and how they impact regular users.