Bridgy Fed is an open source service that bridges personal websites, the fediverse and Bluesky by translating between ActivityPub, the AT Protocol and IndieWeb webmentions. The hosted instance at fed.brid.gy is run by the non-profit A New Social, and the source code is published on GitHub under the bridgy-fed project. It fetches pages from sites whose owners have explicitly opted in by connecting their domain, parsing home pages and posts for microformats2 markup, Open Graph and meta tags, and Atom or RSS feeds so it can mirror those posts to federated networks, and it stops polling feeds once a site sends webmentions instead. The project publishes no IP ranges or reverse DNS hostnames, and because the software is open source any independent operator can run an instance sending the same user agent.

At a glance

Operator: A New Social
Type: Social Media

How Centinel checks it

User agent: The request calls itself this crawler. Anyone can send the same string.

Bridgy Fed publishes nothing Centinel can check a source against, so a match reports the name and leaves the source unconfirmed. The match tokens, verification domains, and address feeds are not published here.

Allowing or blocking it

The crawler object in the /validate response sets access_allowed to true only for a verified source that your tenant allowlists. A policy rule can allow or block this crawler by its category, Social Media.

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