By Anuj Ahooja in News — 02 Dec 2025

Year One & Giving Tuesday

About a year ago, we began developing a plan for A New Social, a nonprofit organization focused solely on liberating users' social graphs from any single platform or protocol.

A New Social adopted Bridgy Fed, a service built by co-founder Ryan Barrett, and received vocal support from some of the most critical organizations in the open social web. But as we kicked off this project, we knew we wanted to go beyond improving and maintaining one service, and this first year has been a wild ride.

We're only two full-time volunteers along with three incredible board members, but we've accomplished more than we could have ever expected. This #GivingTuesday, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate our wins and ask for your support to sustain the incredible momentum we have.

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Let's talk about everything we did in 2025!

Bounce: Cross-Protocol Migration

Our most significant launch of 2025 has to be Bounce, the first utility we built as an organization. It's a first-of-its-kind tool that lets you migrate your social graph between protocols.

As it stands today, you can migrate your Mastodon account to an ATProto service, whether it's Bluesky, Blacksky, or any other provider, or you can migrate your ATProto account to Mastodon or Pixelfed.

While we knew this was an innovation we could be proud of, we were not expecting the immense positive reaction we got from everyone. But it wasn't just a flash in a pan - we're consistently seeing users review their multi-protocol graphs and/or migrate across protocols. We regularly receive valuable user feedback and even requests from other platforms to join the project.

Our aim isn't to reach a billion users; it's to ensure a tool like this exists as long as it's helpful to users. And so far, we've exceeded that goal. In 2026, we expect to add more platforms and migration options, so stay tuned!

Bridgy Fed Settings Page

While you can toggle bridging by following or blocking the Bridgy Fed profile and configuring the bridge via DMs, we felt it would be helpful for users to see all the settings in one place. So, the first user-facing improvement we made to Bridgy Fed was to add a settings page.

We've been evolving the page with new settings ever since. Today, you can sign in with your ATProto, Mastodon, or Pixelfed account, toggle the bridge, configure your ATProto custom domain if you're bridging from ActivityPub, and toggle notifications over DMs. We also recently added new blocking features.

Over the next year, we'll be adding more settings, more login options, and maybe even something you aren't expecting 😉—more on that in 2026.

Notifications Over DMs

After numerous conversations with our users, it became clear that one of the biggest pain points of using Bridgy Fed was how unbridged interactions remained invisible to the user. Users should always have visibility into when they're being mentioned or what's happening on their posts, and we knew we had to resolve this as soon as possible.

Earlier this year, we launched a feature that sends an hourly digest of unbridged interactions over DMs. This meant that our users would never be blindsided and could take action if they wanted to.

We still have improvements to make, but we've been pleased with the consistent positive feedback this feature has received!

Moderation Features

While Bridgy Fed has always allowed users to block profiles across the bridge via the "block" DM command, we wanted to enhance the experience and add additional moderation features.

Over the last few weeks, we did so with two launches:

These were features our community has wanted for a while, so we're glad we could deliver them so quickly. And we're just getting started on moderation features - stay tuned for more early next year!

So much more...

Outside of these more flashy announcements, we've been cleaning up shop under the hood as well. Whether it's reducing the cost of our operations, setting up ways for folks to support us, showing up and contributing to events, or making it easier for developers to work with us. Here's a short list of some of that work:

Reduced the cost of running Bridgy Fed by 75%
Launched an API that enables ActivityPub-based platforms to auto-bridge their users and set a custom domain so they look native on ATProto-based apps like Bluesky
Launched a Patreon
Launched a merch store
Attended, presented, and sometimes helped out with four open social web events: ATmosphere Conference (1, 2), FediForum, the Seattle DWeb Gathering, and Fedicon (1, 2)
Were guests on podcasts like Decentered, FiresideFedi, and Han to Hon Combat
Fixed numerous bugs and improved the reliability of our services

Partnerships & Grants

The best part about working in the open social web is that you don't have to work in a silo. We've had engaging conversations with builders across the space and had the chance to chat with and work with protocol developers, platform and instance owners, client builders, and so much more.

Through these conversations, we've formed some critical partnerships:

The Interledger Foundation: Funded a project for us to integrate the Web Monetization standard into Bridgy Fed and ATProto. We received a grant to fund this work.
Alt Store: Integrated its alternative iOS app store with the Fediverse and then bridged its instance to ATProto via Bridgy Fed. We also received a generous grant from them.
Newsmast Foundation: Building bespoke Fediverse apps for various organizations and communities, all of which will have the option to bridge to the ATmosphere using Bridgy Fed with custom domains.
Bonfire Networks: A new modular social platform toolkit with which we partnered on a fundraiser. They have big plans to integrate with Bridgy Fed and Bounce, and we can't wait to show you what they've been cooking up.
Bluesky PBC: The team over at Bluesky have been supporters of our work since day one, and that has only continued throughout the year. Toward the end of the year, they included us in a series of generous grants they provided to ATProto developers.

All the grants and donations mentioned above have been entirely dedicated to supporting the infrastructure costs of Bridgy Fed and Bounce. Starting next year, we'll also use donations and grants to cover the costs of the services we use to run the organization.

Looking Forward & Thank You

As we approach our second year, we're energized to continue this momentum. We have more upcoming partnerships, additional moderation features, improvements to the user experience, and a few surprises up our sleeve. We'll hopefully kick off January with even more.

We can't thank our community enough for the support. From our Patreon supporters, to developers who contribute code and ideas to our projects, to those who bought our merch, and to all the folks who loudly and tirelessly promote us across the world. Thank you thank you thank you. We couldn't do this without you.

Here's to another year of building A New Social for people, not platforms 🌐

If you believe in our mission and want to support us this #GivingTuesday, you can support us via our Patreon, starting as low as $0.95/month with an annual subscription or $1/month for a monthly subscription.

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You can also support us via our merch store, where our People, Not Platforms V1 collection is still available.