Bridging to Bluesky: The open social web, consent, and GDPR — UlrikeHahn

There’s been intense discussion across the fediverse, GitHub, blogs, and articles about a bridge that would let you use a Mastodon account to follow people on Bluesky, see their posts, reply, like and repost them —and vice versa. It’s an exciting prospect: there is quality content on Bluesky, and it feels in the spirit of an open social web that connects people without restriction by platform (particularly, corporate owned platform). For some, this quickly elevated the bridge to a decisive step in the future of decentralised online social media and even for the ‘future of the internet’ itself.

Prompted partly by the fact that it was first floated as being opt-out there was a wave of backlash that the bridge violated user consent and potentially endangered vulnerable groups (as one can only opt-out of something one actually knows exists). This was countered by arguments claiming that opt-out consent was sufficient (“the fediverse is built on opt-out consent”), was already given by virtue of signing up and publicly posting, or simply wasn’t relevant (“if you want privacy, don’t post on the internet”).

Little discussion involved GDPR – the EU’s General Data Protection Legislation, so this post is my attempt to work through issues raised by the bridge, consent, and GDPR, why it’s tricky and why one should care.

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