Tomorrowland / Walt Disney

People regularly ask me whether Bridgy Fed is ready to scale and support more users. It’s a technical question, but their underlying motivation is usually broader: they believe in the social web, and the fediverse(s), and they want them to connect everyone who’s willing, across instances and networks and protocols.

Right now, the answer is, I don’t know. It’s not a technical thing; as an engineer, that part is catnip for me. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and dive in. The more difficult part is organizational. Right now, Bridgy Fed is effectively one person’s side project. I love building and running (and funding!) it, and I have no plans to change that. However, it has basically no organization, governance, or institutional structure. It’s just me.

That’s ok! At least, as long as it continues to be one person’s side project. It’s growing, though, and people are starting to envision it, and bridges in general, as more important parts of the decentralized social web. Load bearing infrastructure.

Stable, reliable infrastructure is hugely valuable. To do it right, you need stable, reliable organizational structure. You need people to dedicate their time and expertise, sustainably. You need funding, and institutional governance, and some amount of transparency.

Right now, Bridgy Fed mostly doesn’t have those things. It’s one person’s side project.

That could change! I’m open to it. I don’t plan to lead that change myself, though. I’ve enjoyed building it in my spare time for many years now, and I have no plans to stop any time soon. It is not my career, though, or my calling, or my life’s work. I’ve spent my last 10+ years in leadership, I’m comfortable with it, but this isn’t where I’m personally looking to do it. For me, Bridgy Fed just a fun, hopefully useful side project. I’ve been between gigs for a bit now, spending a lot of time on it, but that won’t last forever. I expect to take a real job again eventually, and when that happens, I’ll have way less of that time.

xkcd: Dependency

So, to anyone hoping Bridgy Fed will become core infrastructure for the social web: that is one possible future! The first thing we’d need is an executive director or CEO, someone who wants to lead its organization, product, and policy. Someone who’d build relationships with groups like IFTAS, the SWF, Bluesky, IndieWeb, and others. Someone who’d own fundraising, if necessary. (Funding isn’t the real problem here, though. I self fund Bridgy Fed right now, and I could expand that to help with staff and other costs.)

This wouldn’t be a full time job; I expect it would only take 5-10 hours per week. It wouldn’t necessarily need a dedicated role or standalone organization, either. Bridgy Fed could live comfortably as one of many projects inside a broader group like IFTAS or the SWF, or even a benevolent company like Flipboard or non-profit like Ghost.

Another possible future for Bridgy Fed is the glide path it’s on now: one person’s side project. I can keep running it like this for the foreseeable future. Hopefully useful and stable, but definitely not core infrastructure. No real governance or institutional structure.

In particular, as one person’s side project, Bridgy Fed would probably remain opt-in in most places. This post is not about opt-in vs opt-out, or any other big policy or product decision, but it is about who makes those decisions, and how they should be made. Regardless of how public or global or searchable a network is, or how much it encourages tools to be opt-out – like Bluesky does – making Bridgy Fed opt-out anywhere would set more of an expectation that it’s core infrastructure. As long as it’s just my side project, I can’t satisfy that expectation.

If you think Bridgy Fed needs to grow up and be real infrastructure, and you’re interested in possibly leading it as executive director, or adopting it into a bigger organization, or you know somone who might be, that’s a very possible future. Drop me a line, I’d love to talk. In the meantime, when people ask me whether it can scale, or switch to opt-out, or what the long term plan is, I now have something to point them to. Thanks for reading.