ability to search bridged accounts

[Die4Ever]

I'm a Mastodon user, and I would like to be able to search the bridged accounts to find Bluesky users that I can follow

[snarfed]

Yes! You can generally search for ap.brid.gy in Bluesky to find bridged Mastodon accounts, https://fed.brid.gy/docs#bluesky-follow-fediverse , but there's no good corollary for the other direction, for both technical and cultural reasons. ActivityPub isn't designed for global views of the network like search engines and directories, you have to build them separately, and when people do, the fediverse actively resists them and works to shut them down. There are opt-in-only examples, eg https://fediverse.info/explore/people , but they tend to be pretty useless, eg that one only has ~5k people out of the fediverse's total ~12M user base.

[Krinkle]

@snarfed I think OP may've meant something different. Not a general list and searchable database, but rather a 1:1 lookup.

That is, a page on https://fed.brid.gy/ where I can past https://bsky.app/profile/rreverser.com, hit search, and either be told they haven't bridged, or be taken to https://fed.brid.gy/bsky/rreverser.com from where I can one-click copy @[email protected].

The workarounds today are either:

• Send a bridge request by DM'ing bridgy on Mastodon by at-ing the Bluesky user, wait a few minutes for a response, and either find their handle, or hear that they haven't bridged yet but that it has now been requested.
• Extract the "relevant" portion from the Bluesky page, copy to clipboard, paste into Mastodon search, fight with your mobile operating systems' text cursor selection horror of choice to first place an "@" in front, and then to try hard to remember what clever exotic domain and subdomain, add @bsky.brid.gy, and submit the search to see if that gets a result. When it comes up empty, question whether you did everything correctly.

I imagine most of us are doing the second one, but I think this is a pretty narrow power user funnel. A simple web page that takes care of the magic, as simple as it may seem, would make this orders of magnitudes more accessible.

[Die4Ever]

actually I wanted to be able to search profile text and partial names

I was thinking of being able to go on a page like https://fed.brid.gy/bsky/search, typing in something like speedrunner and finding a bunch of speedrunners who are on Bluesky and are already bridged to the Fediverse so I can follow them, and yes easily being able to copy-paste the Fediverse handles because they can be really clunky to type lol

[snarfed]

Thanks @Die4Ever! And @Krinkle, agreed, and it exists! You can put a handle or id on any supported network into https://fed.brid.gy/#find-user-page , and if that user is bridged, it will open their user page, which links to their original and bridged profiles. There's also a dedicated page for it, https://fed.brid.gy/user-page .

[Krinkle]

@snarfed Thanks, I wasn't aware of that.

First impressions:

1. The form on https://fed.brid.gy/ starts with the message "Already bridged? Enter your handle, user id, or domain here to find your user page: " addresses the owner of the account, not the general audience. I would not have considered using that as such. I also don't know what a "user page" is, but without the added context from this issue tracker, I would assume it is not what I'm looking for, since what I'm looking for is a Fediverse/Mastodon handle.

2. Entering https://bsky.app/profile/rreverser.com gives me an error, claiming they haven't bridged (but they have):

3. Entering @rreverser.com gives me a different error about a "network".

4. Entering rreverser.com seems to work, but the resulting page feels like I've ended up in the wrong place. This is about their blog, not a Bluesky account, and has zero followers. It's suggesting @[email protected] as Fediverse handle, which is different from @bsky.brid.gy. The posts aren't the same either, this is their blog.

[snarfed]

@Krinkle True! The UX and language there are aimed primarily at people looking up their own accounts, and it could definitely be smarter about understanding more URLs and ids.

For finding other people, searching in your fediverse or Bluesky client will often work better, for both full addresses/handles and, at least in Bluesky, partial names.

Regardless, a searchable directory like you describe could definitely help! We'd have to navigate privacy etc concerns, and it'd be a significant project, but still a good idea.

[Die4Ever]

For finding other people, searching in your fediverse

you can't do this until someone else on your instance is already following the user

[snarfed]

you can't do this until someone else on your instance is already following the user

True! Or at least, until your instance has seen the user one way or another.

Search and discovery in the fediverse are very limited and weak in general. I get all the tradeoffs, but still, it's arguably a pretty broken UX. 🤷‍♂️