The x-odus continues and there is a wave of researchers moving from X to another walled-garden called Bluesky. This is good and bad. First, it is good that people are leaving X (imho) and it is good that they move to a platform that supports open standards, the AT Protocol. But I am less sure, about moving to another closed source platform. I prefer Mastodon. You can follow Mastodon accounts with their RSS feeds and that gives BlueSky users the ability to follow me on social media. This is important to me. I have a LinkedIn account too, but you can only follow me there if you have an account there too. To me, that does not align with the Open Science ideals.

But while you can follow me Mastodon accounts with RSS (or just by checking the two webpages, this is a read-only access. That is, you cannot reply. For that, you still need an Mastodon (or Fediverse) account too.

But then there is Bridgy Fed. It “is a decentralized social network bridge. It connects the fediverse, the web, and Bluesky”. I learned about this recently, and it seems to do what it promises. Using the AT Protocol, it allows me to follow and reply to BlueSky users (if they have enabled the bridge), and BlueSky users can interact with me.

So, if you have BlueSky and want to follow one or both of my Mastodon accounts, check out:

But only if they enabled the bridge too, I can follow them back.