Bluesky now finds itself in a crowded microblogging space, competing with other platforms like Mastodon and the soon-to-be-launched Threads.

An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now, users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their posts, as well as like, reply and repost them.Those same people will be able to see the others’ posts in return, too. The technology making this possible is Bridgy Fed, one of the efforts aimed at connecting the fediverse with the web, Bluesky and, perhaps later, other networks like Nostr.Since the 2022 sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, who rebranded the app X, there’s been a surge of interest in decentralized social media. Apps like Mastodon gained a following in the wake of Twitter’s new ownership, as users explored what a network without a centralized authority may look like. Meanwhile, Bluesky — a startup originally incubated within Twitter — raised a seed round and grew its network to over 5.7 million users after launching publicly earlier this year.Other decentralized social media networks are finding footing of their own, too, like the blockchain-based Farcaster, which just last month closed on $150 million in funding from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, USV and others.There’s just one problem these networks face in gaining traction against a rival like X or Meta’s Threads: Their users couldn’t talk to each other.Though both Mastodon and Bluesky are decentralized social media efforts, they rely on different underlying protocols. That means a Mastodon user can interact with others who post elsewhere on the fediverse — that is, other apps that use the older ActivityPub social networking protocol

Decentralization may be coming to social media’s walled gardens, and that means the future of social commerce could be more fediverse than it is metaverse. But what exactly is the fediverse?. At a literal level, the fediverse is short for “federated universe” and it represents an alternative model for social networking that prioritizes decentralization, interoperability, privacy and community-driven development — harkening back to the early days of the internet, when developers were focused on building protocols, not platforms