I read Bridging the Open Web and APIs: Alternative Social Media Alongside the Corporate Web because it was a good opportunity to fill some holes in my knowledge about the Indieweb and Facebook.

Brid.gy enables people to syndicate their posts from their own site to large proprietary social media sites.

Although I don’t use it myself, I’m often impressed when I see all the Twitter “likes” and responses that are backfed by brid.gy to the canonical post on a personal website.

The paper details the challenging history of providing the same for Facebook (in which even Cambridge Analytica plays a part) and helped me appreciate why I never see similar responses from Facebook on personal websites these days.

It ends on a positive note…

while Facebook’s API shutdown led to an overnight decrease in Bridgy accounts (Barrett, 2020), other platforms with which Bridgy supports POSSE remain functional and new platforms have been added, including Meetup, Reddit, and Mastodon.