On Nostr, Farcaster, and other protocols

Right now, Bridgy Fed connects the web, ActivityPub, and AT Protocol. Long term, our goal has always been to level the playing field across many more technologies. We’ve always believed that a new standard shouldn’t be hindered by network effects, and people who want to use them should be able to without needing everyone they care about to have to use it with them. We’ve also shown that by bridging networks, we’re actually able to bridge protocol features as well.

Bridgy Fed is completely open source, so many onlookers have noticed that we’ve experimented with adding new protocols to our codebase, namely Nostr and Farcaster. From a technical perspective, adding protocols is obviously doable, but when it makes sense to bridge networks together, there are more dimensions than just the technical side. We feel a great responsibility to do right by our users, and for the open social web as a whole, not just to build and launch stuff that's technically interesting.

So even though Nostr and Farcaster are sitting in our codebase with near-readiness to launch, we haven’t yet launched them, and we currently have no plans to. We want to go through our thinking as to why this is the case, and hopefully receive feedback from our community about it.

A note before we dive in: if we were to ever add another protocol, we would never automatically bridge users who are already on Bridgy Fed, and we would have explicit ways to opt into each protocol for new users. We understand people will want to pick and choose which networks their account is exposed to, and we’ll always make it entirely clear which networks you’re on.

On Nostr

At A New Social, we’ve always found Nostr to be technically interesting. In fact, when our CTO Ryan Barrett did his presentation at the first AtmosphereConf, he came to the conclusion that many protocols are trending toward Nostr's design in some ways. On the technology side, it's a shape that a number of decentralization social networks have been slowly converging on for a while now.

But, as we said earlier, there are more dimensions to this problem than “technically interesting” and “bridgeable”. What we’ve found in our research and conversations is that Nostr - in general - tends to be a spam vector, and has values and a culture that don't align well with the networks we already bridge.

A technology, however, is not necessarily a monoculture. We’re incredibly excited about DiVine, a Nostr application where the team spent a lot of time ahead of launch focused on trust and safety. One approach we’ve been considering is tapping into communities like DiVine that use Nostr but share our values and priorities, and work with them specifically to bridge users.

If you’re building on Nostr and want to build a safe community using it, we’d love to chat about our shared goals and how we can help you bridge across networks.

On Farcaster

Farcaster is another protocol we find technically interesting, with features like mini-apps and microtransactions. It’s also quite compatible with the other protocols we already have on Bridgy Fed.

That said, creating an account on Farcaster costs roughly $0.25 right now, and as a lean non-profit, that per-user cost is obviously something we'd pay attention to. We’ve discussed this with Farcaster people, and we've considered passing the cost on to users, but we haven’t quite decided the right route forward.

Farcaster itself has also gone through a couple ownership changes over the last year, so we’ve been sitting back and watching to see where things land for who we can work with to potentially roll this out.

Final Thoughts

As you can probably tell, we’ve had many conversations about how doing any of this makes sense. It’s helped us harden our ideas around what it means to connect networks and how we can safely and sustainably approach adding new ones.

Some may say certain protocols are “dying,” or aren’t worth the effort. Nostr's and Farcaster's active user bases, for example, are both small, and shrinking. There are still benefits to alternate protocols existing, though, if for no other reason than bringing new ideas to the table that force the more popular protocols to compete. We’ve already seen how effective the competition between ActivityPub and AT Protocol has been, and the biggest winners have been the people using the protocols.

The endgame is not any one protocol or platform; the endgame is finding the right tools to connect to the people you care about, and helping them to do the same. Hopefully we can help expand that tool set when it makes sense.

A special thanks to Erin Kissane, Ben Werdmuller, and Jon Pincus for advice on this subject.

Thank You!

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