It's been almost three months since my previous post, and I want to update you on the status of Hive | Fediverse bridge. The vision is to add much more bi-directional functionality to the bridge such that Hive content can be discovered easily from all corners of the fediverse.

Can I see the Bridge?

Today, there is some limited integration that allows Mastodon users to look up Hive profiles. See the screenshot below from https://privex.social/@[email protected] (Privex's Mastodon instance).

Today, you can go to any Mastodon instance and search for any Hive account that is registered on hiveposh.com for Twitter or Reddit connection. All you have to do is type in the Hive account name followed by @hiveposh.com.

What's happening under the hood? When a Mastodon user looks up a @hiveposh.com account, a web finger request is sent to hiveposh.com. HivePosh responds to these finger requests by saying, yes I have an account with that address. Mastodon then sends another request asking for more details about the account, HivePosh responds with: here is everything you need to know about the account.

As you can see from the screenshot, HivePosh relays the following profile information:

• account display name
• account description (#HIVE tag appended)
• account creation date
• account URL (using PeakD as a placeholder, can be customizable later)
• account website (from Hive profile metadata)
• number of posts
• number of followers
• number following
• profile photo URL
• profile banner photo URL

What's Next?

While bridging Hive profiles is a neat trick and a good start for the bridge, it is not very useful. What would be 100 times more useful is for Hive content to be broadcast into the Fediverse.

There are a few new pieces needed to make content broadcasting possible. Mastodon has a limitation in that it does not fetch old posts. New posts have to be pushed to the instance from another instance using the activityPub protocol.

First, the bridge running on hiveposh.com needs to store follower lists. Each registered Hive-ian would have one of these lists. When a fediversian "follows" a Hive-ian, the new follower is added to their list.

Second, after the bridge knows who is following whom, it can push content to the followers' inboxes. Then, fediversians will see Hive content in their feeds. Replies to those posts won't make their way back to Hive yet, but discussion threads can happen locally in the fediverse.

The logical next step is to get these two pieces in place to enable one-way content bridging. Afterward, the bridge should be improved to relay replies in the other direction back to Hive.

Thoughts?

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