[Idea] Use pins on profiles to inform people that they're looking at a bridged account, and that interaction will not work unless they're bridged too

[Yamakyu]

Sorry for the long title.

I think it would be easier to get people to understand why they need to bridge to enable interaction between Fedi and Bsky if it's clearly written in clear plain text on a profile.
The bridged from shelter.moe/@Yamakyu on the fediverse by fed.brid.gy note is a decent start, but since it doesn't directly point to the bridgy account on Bsky (and I think it's not a bad thing that it doesn't), I suspect some people don't get what's going on and don't look any further.

Since we don't have a use for pinned posts on bridged accounts, I think we could use pins to set a message that clearly tells the essential info.

• That this profile is not native but bridged from the Fediverse
• That interaction from whoever is looking at the profile won't go through unless they also bridge
• How to bridge

I think that would go a long way, no ? It might also be possible to elaborate in replies to the pinned post, but maybe this is out of the scope of this idea. But I think that would be useful.

I have written in plain clear text in my native Bsky profile that my native Fedi account bridged to Bsky is my main account. But I don't have enough room to add the crucial information that I cannot see non bridged people from Fedi and they need to bridge. Then some people either chose not to, forget to, or simply don't read it. I think it would be clearer if this info was directly on the bridged account, and preferably with a stricly direct link or @ to https://bsky.app/profile/ap.brid.gy

It could (?) be a simple command we PM to Bridgy. For exemple (from Fedi), a PM like @[email protected] pin would prompt bridgy to post a premade message about this, and pin it to the bridged profile. Maybe unpin could remove it. Maybe it could be a "custom" message (but I can think of a few ways how it could go "wrong" or be annoying to handle).

But here you are. I think it could be a good way to communicate efficiently that people from Bsky are completely invisible to people on Fedi, unless they bridge, and vice versa.

Thanks for reading, and have a good one

[snarfed]

Hey, thank you for the feedback and ideas!

You're absolutely right, bridging is non-obvious right now. Education and outreach are a big part of our future plans with https://www.anew.social/ . Bluesky's short profile bio character limit makes it extra difficult to explain there. Pinned posts could help, but Bluesky only supports one pinned post per account, and Bluesky posts also have a short character limit. Plus, we eventually want to bridge people's own pinned posts themselves! #1374

There's a tradeoff between bridging profiles and posts faithfully, trying to mirror them as accurately as possible, vs using bridged profiles and posts to explain the bridge itself. In general, we (I) prefer the former: I want bridged accounts to look as much possible like their original account, and I prioritize that over hijacking their space to explain the bridge.

It's definitely a common request though! More background in #1688. You may also be interested in #1471.

[Daft-Freak]

Related to this, I actually hacked together a patch to replace the fed.brid.gy link with a mention of the bot for bluesky, then realised it would be harder to do that for everything else due to needing a link...

(The reasoning there being that it's easier to get to the website from the bot user than it is to find the bot user from the site.)

[snarfed]

Tentatively closing as a duplicate of #1688. Feel free to reopen if you disagree!