How ActivityPub connects TouchGrass and Mastodon

A social network should earn your time by being useful. If choosing another service means losing touch with your friends, that choice comes with a cost the service can benefit from. We think people should be able to choose differently and keep talking.

ActivityPub makes that possible between TouchGrass and Mastodon. It is an open standard for exchanging posts, follows and replies. Like email between different providers, it lets independently run services communicate. Those connected social services form part of the fediverse.

You can follow a friend using their Mastodon address, read their public posts in TouchGrass and reply from here. They receive the conversation on Mastodon. Neither of you has to persuade the other to move just to stay in touch.

Bluesky uses a different standard, ATProto. Linking your Bluesky account lets TouchGrass bring in posts from people you follow there and lets you reply to them. The technical connection is different; the reason for making it is the same.

That principle applies to TouchGrass too. Being independent of Big Tech should mean giving people a meaningful choice about where their social lives happen. We should have to keep earning that choice.