Bridgy Fed, a project to connect the open social web, is now becoming a nonprofit

Bridgy Fed, which is working to connect the social network Bluesky with the wider fediverse (aka the open social web), which includes sites like Mastodon and others, will be the first app incubated within a new nonprofit called A New Social. The organization, announced Tuesday, aims to bring together developers, researchers, startups, and industry leaders building infrastructure for the open social web, including those adopting protocols like Bluesky’s AT Protocol and ActivityPub, which powers Mastdon, Meta’s Threads, and the rest of the fediverse.

The nonprofit itself was founded by CTO and Bridgy Fed founder Ryan Barrett along with engineering leader, now A New Social’s CEO and executive director, Anuj Ahooja.

Ahooja has been actively involved in fediverse-related projects, having previously advised a service that was looking to fund the fediverse via paid subscriptions to premium feeds. That service, sub.club, has already wound down, citing a lack of funds. However, it’s expected there will be a lot of experimentation in this new era of social web development, as people try out different ideas, fail fast, and then move on to others.

The idea to form a nonprofit around Barrett’s efforts with Bridgy Fed came about as the project grew from a personal side project to one attracting wider attention — and even contentious debate at times about how the technology should be built, he says.

As he continued to talk to people about what he was building with Bridgy Fed, he saw a future where the work would become a more established infrastructure. That required some sort of organizational structure and additional voices offering input and direction.

Barrett says he was open to the idea of raising outside capital from VCs, but admits he didn’t see a clear business for Bridgy Fed. “In terms of what it is as a product or a service, it’s in a funny position … The business model was not clear to me,” he admits.

So, instead of going the startup route, Barrett teamed up with Ahooja, who was already planning to organize a collection of utilities under a nonprofit structure with A New Social. Ahooja had seen a post from Barrett asking for help with Bridgy Fed and realized that they should talk.

“It just kind of clicked in the early phases of our conversations,” Ajooja says. “I had an idea of not just what Bridgy Fed is today, but the implications of a combined network and what you can do with it. I think that really resonated with the way Ryan was thinking about it, as well.”

A New Social is now recruiting a board of directors to guide its efforts. The organization will initially focus on Bridgy Fed and raising funds via other sources, like crowdfunding, grants, and investments from industry partners. (The latter conversations are already underway, we understand.)

It will later work to identify other open social projects, like Bridgy Fed, which are working to build for the open social web or connect the different open ecosystems that are currently separate from one another. Later, that may include those building with different protocols like Farcaster, nostr, and others.

The nonprofit will also work with existing leaders in the space, like Bluesky, Flipboard, Meta (which is integrating with ActivityPub via its app Threads), and Mastodon to help identify these projects and their developers.

“Before we even started this, we [made] sure that the platforms are on board, because if they’re not on board, then our existence doesn’t even matter,” Ahooja points out. “I think that’s one of the reasons an organization was important, so we’d have a process around all of these different platforms: getting them in the same room and having these conversations.”

A New Social is not the only organization to focus on the open social web as of late. Recently, another new nonprofit, The Social Web Foundation (SWF), co-founded by the co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, Evan Prodromou, launched with a focus on expanding the fediverse and making the user experience even easier. A New Social plans to work with SWF and other organizations like the Independent Federated Trust & Safety (IFTAS) as it grows.