2026-07-20
The open social web gives you something traditional social media never could: the freedom to own your identity instead of renting it from a platform.
Today there are three major ecosystems, each built around a different protocol:
Each ecosystem makes different trade-offs between convenience, ownership, portability, and social experience. This guide compares them and shows how you can combine them into a coherent identity across all three.
The first decision is simple:
Where is your canonical source of truth?
Everything else can be syndicated from there.
Some common choices are:
| Protocol | Hosted option | Self-hosted option |
|---|---|---|
| ActivityPub | Mastodon or another Fediverse server | Starling or your own ActivityPub server |
| IndieWeb | Your own website | Idno or a custom website |
| AT Protocol | Bluesky | Self-hosted PDS |
None of these are objectively better—they simply optimize for different goals.
| Feature | ActivityPub | IndieWeb | AT Protocol |
|---|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Very easy using Mastodon | Moderate—you need a website | Extremely easy using Bluesky |
| Data ownership | Depends on your server unless self-hosted | Excellent—you own everything | Excellent if hosting your own PDS |
| Self-host friendliness | Good (Starling is lightweight, Mastodon is heavier) | Excellent (simple PHP or static sites) | Moderate (PDS requires more infrastructure) |
| Software ecosystem | Rich ecosystem (Mastodon, Akkoma, Misskey, GoToSocial, Starling...) | Publishing-focused tools and standards | Smaller ecosystem centered around Bluesky |
| Blog integration | Possible, but platform-dependent | Native via Microformats2, Webmention, Micropub | Good with tools like Standard Site and Sequoia |
| Cross-posting support | Good | Excellent with Bridgy | Mostly relies on Bridgy Fed |
If you simply want to start publishing immediately, Bluesky and Mastodon are the easiest choices. Registration takes only a few minutes and there is essentially no maintenance afterward.
IndieWeb requires more initial setup because your website becomes your identity. Once configured, however, publishing can be just as seamless through Micropub clients such as Quill.
This is where IndieWeb shines.
Your website is the source of truth, your content lives on infrastructure you control, and your identity is tied to your own domain instead of an account on someone else's server.
ActivityPub and AT Protocol can reach a similar level of ownership when self-hosted, but hosted services inevitably place some control in the hands of an administrator.
IndieWeb has the lightest requirements by far. A simple PHP hosting account or static site is often enough.
ActivityPub varies considerably. Starling is lightweight and designed for single-user deployments, whereas Mastodon requires significantly more infrastructure and background services.
Running your own AT Protocol PDS sits somewhere in the middle. It is very manageable, but requires dedicated infrastructure and is currently more operationally involved than hosting a traditional website.
ActivityPub has the largest diversity of interoperable software. Mastodon, Akkoma, GoToSocial, Misskey, Pixelfed and many others all speak the same protocol while offering different user experiences.
AT Protocol currently revolves primarily around Bluesky, although projects such as Atmosphere are beginning to expand the ecosystem.
IndieWeb is less about applications and more about standards. Technologies like Microformats2, Webmention and Micropub can be mixed and matched with many publishing systems.
IndieWeb was built around websites, making it the natural choice for bloggers.
Microformats2 adds semantic metadata to your pages, while Micropub clients such as Quill provide a polished publishing experience.
AT Protocol has growing support through projects such as Standard Site and Sequoia, making it increasingly practical to publish blog posts directly into the AT Protocol ecosystem.
ActivityPub blog integration depends heavily on the software you choose. Some platforms are publishing-focused, while others primarily target social networking.
Bridgy is one of the strongest reasons to choose an IndieWeb-first workflow.
It can bridge your website to multiple social networks, including Bluesky and Mastodon. Using POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), you publish once on your own website while Bridgy automatically creates corresponding posts on supported platforms.
Even better, Bridgy periodically backfeeds replies, likes, reposts, and other interactions to your website. Your website remains the canonical source while social platforms become distribution channels.
Because the syndicated accounts are your real Bluesky or Mastodon accounts, you retain complete control. You can stop bridging at any time, remove syndicated posts, or continue using those accounts independently.
Bridgy Fed serves a different purpose. Instead of syndicating posts, it bridges identities between ActivityPub and AT Protocol. An ActivityPub account can appear on Bluesky, and vice versa.
However, these bridged identities are not full native accounts. You cannot log into them or configure them like a regular Mastodon or Bluesky account. Their behavior is controlled indirectly through the source account.
In other words:
Today, running fully self-hosted implementations of all three ecosystems generally requires three separate services:
Fortunately, there are ways to reduce this.
The latest versions of Idno include an experimental ActivityPub plugin.
It currently supports publishing, editing and deleting notes, as well as follow and unfollow activities. Incoming federation is still limited—it does not currently backfeed interactions or present them through the website interface.
Meanwhile, Starling has begun experimenting with AT Protocol by supporting handle validation. This allows you to reuse the same domain for your ActivityPub and AT Protocol identities, even though Starling is not acting as a full PDS.
If your goal is consistent identity branding rather than complete protocol support, a practical setup is:
https://example.com@user@example.com@example.comHost your website with Idno, run your PDS separately, and configure your AT Protocol handle to use the same domain. Bridgy can continue syndicating your website to Bluesky exactly as before, even if you self-host the PDS.
This gives you a consistent identity across three protocols while maintaining only two servers.
If your priority is participating deeply in the Fediverse, running a dedicated ActivityPub server such as Starling provides a much richer experience.
Unlike the current Idno ActivityPub plugin, Starling supports a much more complete social workflow, including sending and receiving activities similarly to a lightweight single-user Mastodon instance.
The trade-off is that Bridgy's POSSE workflow currently works best with Mastodon-compatible servers. Other ActivityPub implementations, including Starling, may not yet provide the same seamless publishing experience because API behavior varies across implementations.
Ultimately, the decision comes down to how important your ActivityPub presence is.
If your goal is simply to establish an identity so people can discover you across protocols, Idno with its ActivityPub plugin provides a compact and elegant solution. You gain an IndieWeb site, an ActivityPub identity, and—with a self-hosted PDS using the same domain—a consistent identity across all three ecosystems.
If, instead, you expect to actively participate in the Fediverse by following people, replying, interacting, and treating ActivityPub as a first-class social network, a dedicated server such as Starling is currently the better choice.
A balanced naming scheme could look like:
example.compds.example.com (handle: @example.com)social.example.com (@me@social.example.com)There is no single perfect architecture today. The open social web is still evolving, and each ecosystem is gradually borrowing ideas from the others. Fortunately, open standards mean you are never permanently locked into one approach.
The important part is choosing one canonical identity that you own, then letting bridges and federation connect you to the rest of the social web.