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Bridgy Fedwhich is working to connect The Bluesky social network is wider fediverse It will be the first program to be incubated under a new non-profit organization called Mastodon, which includes Mastodon and other sites (aka the open social network). New Social. The organization, announced Tuesday, aims to bring together developers, researchers, startups and industry leaders who are building infrastructure for the open social network, including those adopting protocols like Bluesky’s. AT Protocol and ActivityPubwhich powers MastdonMeta’s Topicsand the rest fediverse.
The non-profit organization itself was founded by the CTO and founder of Bridgy Fed Ryan Barrett engineering leader, now CEO and COO of A New Social, Anuj Ahooja.
Ahooja has been actively involved in fediverse related projects advised a service before was looking to fund fediverse through paid subscriptions to premium feeds. That service, sub.club, already shakenciting lack of funds. However, in this new era of social web development, expect a lot of experimentation as people try different ideas, fail quickly, and then move on to others.
Barrett’s idea to create a nonprofit around his efforts with the Bridgy Fed came about as the project evolved from a personal project to one that attracted wider attention. even controversial arguments at times it says about how to build technology.
As Bridgy continued to talk to people about what he had built with the Fed, he saw a future where the business would evolve into a more robust infrastructure. This required some sort of organizational structure and additional voices offering input and direction.
Barrett says he’s open to the idea of raising capital outside of VCs, but Bridgy admits he doesn’t have a clear case for the Fed. “In terms of what it is as a product or service, it’s in a funny situation … The business model was not clear to me,” he said.
So instead of going the startup route, Barrett teamed up with Ahooja, who already plans to organize a collection of utilities under a nonprofit structure with A New Social. Ahooja had seen a post from Barrett asking Bridgy Fed for help and realized they needed to talk.
“It just clicked in the early stages of our conversations,” says Ajooja. “I had a vision not only of what Bridgy Fed is today, but of the implications of a combined network and what you can do with it. I think it really resonated with the way Ryan thought about it.”
New Social is now hiring a management team to guide its efforts. The organization will initially focus on Bridgy Fed and raise funds through other sources such as crowdfunding, grants and investments from industry partners. (The last talks are already going on, we understand.)
It will then try to identify other open social projects, such as Bridgy Fed, which will build for an open social network or connect different open ecosystems that are currently separate from each other. Later, this can include buildings with different protocols such as farcaster, nostr and others.
The nonprofit will also work with existing leaders in the space Bluesky, FlipboardMeta (integrates with ActivityPub through its own application Topics), and Mastodon to help identify these projects and their developers.
“We made sure the platforms were on board before we started this, because if they’re not on board, we don’t matter,” notes Ahooja. “I think that’s one of the reasons the organization is important, so we’ll have a process around all these different platforms: getting them in the same room and having these conversations.”
A New Social isn’t the only organization focusing on open social networking lately. Recently, another new non-profit organization, Social Web Foundation Founded by ActivityPub protocol co-author Evan Prodromou (SWF), it started with a focus on expanding fediverse and making the user experience even easier. New Social plans to work with other organizations such as SWF and Independent Federated Trust & Safety.IFTS) as it grows.
