Users are always seeking more control over their social networking experience to make it better, whether to improve privacy or enhance flexibility. Interoperability between social networking platforms like Facebook and TikTok has so many benefits that solve those issues.  

Say you’re on multiple platforms because you have friends you follow on different networks, but you’ve decided to choose one platform with better privacy practices. With interoperability, you could switch and still interact with friends who remain on larger platforms. It could also enable independent apps with better privacy controls and more user choice. These are the untapped possibilities that could benefit users in the European Union under the 2022 Digital Markets Act (DMA).  

Yet, the European Commission, in its first review of the DMA, announced in April it had decided not to extend the DMA’s interoperability mandate to social networking and didn’t give a deadline or a timeline for enforcing that part of the Act. The Commission said “there is no clear demand” from users and businesses for social networking interoperability and, in any case, it’s too technically complex at the moment. Meanwhile, the Big Tech platforms that have been slow-walking interoperability over the last two years, erecting a myriad of hurdles for users seeking more freedom to choose other platforms, get a pass.

This is a huge disappointment and a missed opportunity by the Commission. Interoperability dismantles one of the biggest barriers faced by users who want to leave the tech giants’ platforms: the choice between changing to a platform you prefer or staying behind on a platform where all your friends, communities, and customers are.

The DMA, which went into force in 2024, aims to foster more choices for European Union users and encourage competition and innovation by forcing so-called gatekeeper platforms like Meta, Apple, and Google, to open their ecosystems to competitors. The regulation does a great deal to foster the integration of competing services and devices with the ecosystems of very large online platforms that act as gatekeepers. It even requires interoperability for messaging services, despite the significant technical and privacy challenges involved.

So, it’s odd that the Commission is using complexity as a shield against taking on social networking interoperability. The internet already runs on complex interoperable systems. Approaches like ActivityPub, the decentralized networking protocol behind the “Fediverse,” which gave rise to decentralized networks like Mastodon, already exist. The DMA shouldn’t mandate a specific protocol, but it can require meaningful interoperability outcomes.

The argument that there’s no real demand for social networking interoperability also falls flat. Users want the ability to move across platforms, choose the content they’d like to see from platforms, and not be tied down to a single platform. But there’s no way to get there—the platforms are doing little to open their social networking ecosystems. And now you have the DMA’s enforcer saying it’s not going to make them change. Demand for alternatives won’t materialize at scale until users see real progress towards interoperability, something the Commission has the power to do.

Having decided there’s little demand and too much complexity to proceed with mandating social networking interoperability, the Commission said it “will continue to monitor and assess how these services evolve.” This wait-and-see-posture only hurts users and strengthens and further entrenches Big Tech incumbents.

The DMA is supposed to center on the rights of technology users and be the pathway to an internet experience where you decide which software runs on your devices, where it’s easy to find the best products and services, and where you can leave a platform for a better one without forfeiting your social relationships.

Meanwhile, Big Tech is also resisting the DMA’s openness requirements. For example, Apple is supposed to be opening up iOS devices to rival app stores. Yet, the smartphone giant’s plan for opening its App Store levies junk fees and onerous conditions on app makers and is effectively impossible for any competitor to use.

It’s not just Apple pushing back against DMA enforcement. Meta's response is a “pay for privacy “system, in which users who do not consent to Meta’s surveillance will have to pay to use the service, or be blocked from it. Whether their plan complies with the DMA remains under review.

Nowhere in the DMA does it say social networking companies get to install a toll booth for users seeking to benefit from privacy rights the regulation grants them. The future EU Digital Fairness Act is another opportunity to protect users from such practices by declaring them unfair.

The Commission has responded to these developments with investigations, preliminary rulings, and fines. Meanwhile, users are missing out on greater choice and flexibility in how they communicate and connect online.  

Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to reclaim our feeds and networks. Good news: there’s a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable: Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as RSS.

What’s RSS and How Do I Use It?

RSS has been around since 1999, but its real publicity glow-up came from Google Reader, a newsreader service that Google offered between 2005 and 2013. Despite the alarm bells people rang at the time, the death of Google Reader wasn’t the death of RSS, and many replacements have come and gone over the years.

RSS may seem complicated, but it boils down to one general concept: when websites publish new content, like news articles, blog entries, webcomics, videos, or podcasts, that content gets added to an RSS feed, where your RSS reader (aka newsreader, feed reader, or aggregator) will show you that content in chronological order. If you’ve ever used a podcast player like Apple Podcasts or Spotify to follow different podcasts, you’ve used RSS. You can think of it like an internet-wide “follow” button, where you can track the contents of websites, users, and more.

People talk about RSS like it’s a power user’s secret trick to making the internet more usable, but the real secret is that it’s not that hard to set up and use. Here’s what you need to do:

• Find an RSS reader: RSS readers come in many forms. Feedly, NewsBlur, or The Old Reader, are web-based, but have their own apps (though they also support third-party apps). Others, like NetNewsWire, are app-based, and support either using a web-based RSS reader like Feedly, or a local file. Some live in browsers or web extensions. There’s an abundance of choice in RSS readers, and part of the fun is finding one that best accomplishes what you want to do. But don’t worry about finding the right RSS reader right away. One of the many magic tricks of RSS is that it is platform agnostic, and nearly every RSS reader—whether it's a website or an app, supports importing and exporting a list of the sites you subscribe to. This means you can change RSS readers in a couple minutes. If you need some help finding an RSS reader, Wired, The Verge, and Privacy Guides all have useful roundups. 
• Collect your feeds: As for adding websites to your feeds, the process is straightforward. Most RSS readers are designed to help find the feed for a site for you, so you don’t need to go hunting down a special link. Just drop the URL of what you want to follow in your reader, and if an RSS feed exists, it should be able to find it. If not, some sites, including ours (and our current podcast, EFFector as well as our last series, How to Fix the Internet), provide direct links to our RSS feeds.
• Sort, filter, and build your feed: Adding a bunch of new feeds can be overwhelming, particularly for news sites. RSS readers typically include folders, which let you group similar feeds together and can be great for lifting up low-traffic updates you don’t want to miss. Your reader may also have different filters, like the option to block any article that contains “sponsored post.” 

RSS Is the Best Way to Follow the News

It can be very difficult to follow the news, whether that means politics, tech policy, or your hobbies. Solutions like Google News or Apple News have tried to make this simpler, but many find that their algorithmic feeds are as often a source of frustration and annoyance as they are genuinely useful. And no matter how often you tap on news stories that matter to you from publications you respect, there may always be stories that refuse to bubble up.

RSS can make reading the news much easier, reliable, and more private. The vast majority of news sites have RSS feeds you can subscribe to, and many, including CNN, The New York Times, BBC, Wired, Politico, and many others, offer RSS for specific sections or special feeds that include the full text of articles for subscribers, so you aren’t just pummeled with a firehose of news all day long (we’ll get to a tip below in the next section that tackles this problem if they don’t have separate feeds, though). In many cases, you can read articles right in your RSS reader, never being forced to engage with wonky comments sections or poor design choices on websites.

Of course, the news isn’t just general news sites, it also includes hobbyist or more niche sites, local news offerings, and blogs. Most of these sorts of websites also offer RSS feeds, as do newsletter platforms like Substack or Ghost. 

RSS Offers One Way to Fix Some Social Feeds

Decentralized social media like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, use RSS for user feeds, so you can follow your friend’s posts on Bluesky or Mastodon without actually having an account on either. This can be especially helpful for news sources, too—where you likely wouldn’t want to subscribe to a feed of everything a national news organization publishes because that would include dozens if not hundreds of stories a day, you can instead subscribe to their social media posts, which often get you the most breaking or important news.

The internet is more than just Facebook.

Some legacy social media works with RSS, too, including YouTube, Reddit (though that is currently at risk), and Tumblr. But others, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, wall off posts behind account requirements that seem to pop up if you simply look at an account page for too long, let alone come in from an RSS feed. These walled gardens prevent information from getting out there, which ranges from annoying, like when your favorite local brewery only posts their food truck schedule on Instagram, to dangerous, like when local public services only post to a Facebook page.

The internet is more than just Facebook. It’s more than Mastodon or Bluesky, too. It’s a decentralized smorgasbord of websites, tools, feeds, newsletters, social profiles, and more, and treating it as such will help us wrangle the information we want and trust. 

Other Surprising Places You’ll Find RSS Feeds

When in doubt, try copying and pasting the URL for a site into your RSS reader of choice, you might be surprised to find a feed that proves useful to you. Many places on the internet may offer RSS feeds without you even realizing it. For example, if you want to keep an eye on an artist’s prints that you like, but you don’t have Instagram where they usually post, you might be able to subscribe to their webstore, as some shopping platforms, like Big Cartel, create XML feeds that some RSS readers can read. And for something even more tweakable, even Google Alerts can be turned into RSS feeds.

RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around.

If you prefer to track policy over products, then you’ll be happy to know that government sites often support RSS, including most U.S. government sites, many of which break them into different sections like the U.S. Department of State’s various feeds. Many local governments or other public services, like fire departments may offer the same. Some universities (and university newspapers) also sometimes offer some RSS feeds. 

And even if a website doesn’t have an RSS feed, there are workarounds from tools like RSSHub, RSS-Bridge, and RSS.app that require varying levels of technical expertise or a willingness to pay subscription fees.

RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around. RSS has come in and out of fashion, been declared dead, and has come back, every time. Open systems are the best way forward to a free, equitable internet, and the resilience and continued reinvention of RSS has shown just how creative the web community can be with open protocols.

Correction: clarified that Big Cartel creates an XML file, not an RSS feed.

Update, June 8, 2026: Following widespread public scrutiny and WIRED’s critical reporting, Meta has stripped the unactivated facial recognition code from its latest Meta AI app update.

Meta has deployed facial recognition code to millions of their always-on surveillance glasses, according to new reporting by Wired. EFF’s Threat Lab was able to confirm that the facial recognition code is present through static analysis of the application. 

This dangerous new Meta functionality stores faceprints as a series of 2,048 numbers uniquely representing the positioning of a person’s facial features. When this feature is activated, it will convert every new face in the sightlines of the surveillance glasses into a series of numbers, and compare it to all the existing faceprints in the user’s database.

Wired and EFF confirmed that the code is present and active, though not yet exposed to consumers. Another researcher confirmed that when they manually added a face to the app database by connecting the phone to a computer in debug mode and issuing a few commands, the glasses would subsequently detect that face when it came into view. 

Meta has already paid $650 million to settle a BIPA lawsuit challenging mass facial recognition of every photo posted to its platform, a feature which it has since shut down. 

Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine. This is just one more reason to think twice before buying or using Meta’s surveillance glasses. 

Considering that Meta previously wrote in an internal document that they want to launch facial recognition “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns," this invasive new feature doesn't come as a surprise. But Meta's surveillance plans won't escape public scrutiny that easily, and we'll be watching if this feature is rolled out to the public. 

One of the central promises of open social media services is interoperability—the idea that wherever you personally decide to post doesn’t require others to be there just to follow what you have to say. Think of it like a radio broadcast: you want to reach people and don't care where they are or what device they're using. For example, in theory, a Bluesky user can follow someone on Mastodon or Threads without having to create a Mastodon or Threads account. But these systems are still a work in progress, and you might need to tweak a few things to get it working correctly.

Right now, broadcasting your message across social platforms can be a funky experience at best, deliberately broken up by oligopolists. The idea of the open web was baked into the internet via protocols like HTML and RSS that made it easy for anyone to visit a website or follow most blogs. The fact social media isn’t similarly open reflects an intentional choice to privatize the internet. 

Bridging and managing your posts so they’re viewable outside a singular source is part of the broader philosophy of POSSE, short for Post Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere (sometimes its Post Own Site, Share Everywhere). Instead of managing several accounts across different services, you post once to one primary site (which might be your personal website, or just one social media account), then set it up so it automatically publishes everywhere else. This way, it doesn’t matter where you or your audience is, and they're not walled off by account registration requirements. 

We’ll come back around to POSSE at the end of this post, but for now, let’s assume you just want your current main open social media account to actually have a chance to reach the most people it can. 

Why Post to the Open Social Web

Because the Fediverse and ATmosphere use different protocols, we need to use a third-party tool so accounts can communicate with each other. For that, we’ll need a bridge. As the name suggests, a bridge can connect one social media account to another, so you can post once and spread your message across several places. This isn’t just some niche concept: major blogging platforms like Wordpress and Ghost integrate posting to the Fediverse.

Bridging is an important facet of POSSE, but also something more people should consider, even if they don’t run their own websites. For example, if you don’t want to create a Threads account just to interact with your one friend who uses that platform, you shouldn’t have to. The good news is, you don’t. There are several bridging services, like Fedisky, RSS Parrot, and pinhole, but Bridgy Fed is currently the simplest to use, so we’ll focus on that. 

How to Post to Bluesky from Mastodon

From your Mastodon account (or other Fediverse account, for simplicity’s sake we’ll stick to Mastodon throughout), search for the username @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy and follow that account. Once you do, the account will follow you back and you’ll be bridged and people can find you from their Bluesky account. You should also get a DM with your bridged username. If you don’t see the @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy user when you search, your Mastodon instance may be blocking the bridging tool. 

Threads users who have enabled Fediverse sharing will be able to find you with your standard Mastodon username (ie, @your_user_name@mastodon.social), but if they haven’t enabled sharing, they will not be able to see your account. While this search is still a beta feature, you might find it easier to share the full URL, which would look like this: https://www.threads.net/fediverse_profile/@your_user_name@mastodon.social

People on Bluesky can find you by: Either searching for your Mastodon username, or if that doesn’t work, @your_user_name.instance.ap.brid.gy. For example, if your username is @eff@mastodon.social, it would appear as @eff.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy.

An example of a Mastodon username from the Bluesky web client.

How to Post to Mastodon and Bluesky from Threads

Yes, Threads is technically on the Fediverse, and you can bridge your Threads account to Mastodon or Bluesky (unless you’re in Europe, where the feature is disabled), but it’s a different process than on Bluesky and Mastodon.

• Open Settings > Account > Fediverse Sharing and set the option to “On.” This will make your posts visible to Mastodon (or other Fediverse) users, and vice versa. 
• Once the Fediverse sharing is enabled, you’ll likely need to wait a week, then you can bridge to Bluesky. Search for and follow the @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy account (it may take some digging to find it, but if that doesn’t work you can try visiting the profile page directly. 

People on Mastodon (or other Fediverse accounts) and Bluesky can find you by: Mastodon users can find you at, @your_threads_username@threads.net while Bluesky users will find you at, @your_threads_username.threads.net.ap.brid.gy (seriously, that will be the username). Note that some Mastodon instances may block Threads users entirely.

An example of a Threads username from the Mastodon web client.

An example of a Threads username from the Bluesky web client.

How to Post to Mastodon and Threads from Bluesky

From your Bluesky (or other ATProto) account, search for the username, “@ap.brid.gy” and follow that account. Once you do, the account will follow you back and you’ll be bridged, so people can follow you from Mastodon or other Fediverse accounts. You should also get a DM with your bridged username.

People on Mastodon (or other Fediverse account) and Threads can find you by: Your username will appear as @your_bluesky_username@bsky.brid.gy. For example, if your Bluesky username is @eff@bsky.social, it would appear as @eff.bksy.social@bsky.brid.gy.

An example of a Bluesky username from the Mastodon web client.

How to Post Everywhere from Your Own Website

You can bridge more than social media accounts. If you have your own website, you can bridge that too (as long as it supports microformats and webmention, or an Atom or RSS feed. If you have a blog, there’s a good chance you’re already good to go). When you do so, the bridged account will either post the full text (or image) of whatever you post to your personal site, or a link to that content,  depending on how your website is set up. You’ll also probably want to log into your Bridgy user page so you can manage the account. 

Where people can find your bridged account: Usually, a user can just search for your website’s URL on their decentralized social network of choice, or enter it on the Bridgy Fed page. But if that doesn’t work, they can try @yourdomain.com@web.brid.gy from Mastodon or @yourdomain.com.web.brid.gy from Bluesky.

An example of a bridged website username in the Mastodon web client.

How Your Account Username Looks on Each Platform

You’re Bound to Run Into Some Quirks

• Sometimes messages take a little while to crossover between networks, and sometimes they don't crossover at all.
• You can’t log into a bridged account like a regular account, but Bridgy Fed does provide some tools to see incoming notifications and recent activity in case they’re not coming through properly.
• ActivityPub and ATProto don’t have the same feature set, so you will have certain capabilities for one account you might not have in another. For example, you can edit posts on Mastodon, but not on Bluesky. If you edit a post that’s bridged from Mastodon to Bluesky, the Bluesky post will not be updated. 
• Replies can sometimes get lost, especially if the person (or people) replying to you doesn’t have sharing turned on.
• Ownership of accounts can get weird. For example, if you post to your own website and use a tool like Wordpress or Ghost for federation (more info below), you don’t necessarily get access to a “normal” social media account, with a standard login and password.
• And more! This is still a work in progress that has some technical quirks, but it’s improving all the time, and it’s best to keep telling yourself that troubleshooting is part of the fun.

Other Cool Stuff You Can Do

As mentioned up top, there’s a lot more you can do, and an increasing number of tools are making this process simpler. Bridgy Fed is one way to post to more places from a single account, but it’s far from the only way to do so. Here are just a few examples.

• Micro.blog is a paid service where you can blog from your own domain name, then post automatically to Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Tumblr, Nostr, LinkedIn, Medium, Pixelfed, and Flickr.
• Ghost is a blogging and newsletter platform that offers direct integration with the Fediverse, as well as support for Bluesky. Wordpress offers the option to join the Fediverse through a community plugin. Other newsletter platforms, like Buttondown, also have plans for federation. 
• Surf.social is a landing page and social media utility where you can show off all your various accounts (Federated or not). From the reader point of view, you can follow one publications numerous types of posts in one place. For example, 404 Media’s Surf.social feed includes its YouTube feed, podcast feed, and its journalist’s social media posts.
• If you think these new handles are a bit ugly, you can use a custom domain for Bluesky or fediverse account from your website. 

Of course, there are plenty of other tools, blogging platforms, and other utilities out there to help facilitate posting and bridging accounts, with new ones coming along every day. 

With proper support, time, and effort, eventually we will all be able to seamlessly interact across platforms, take our follows and followers to other services when a platform no longer suits our needs, and interact with a variety of web content regardless of what platform hosts it. Until then, we still need to do some DIY work, support the services we want to succeed, and push for more platforms and services to support federated protocols.

Correction: an earlier version of this blog was missing the full Bluesky username in the account username chart.