The Open Bridge Working Group is a volunteer-effort to help activists, artists and creators syndicate their posts from Instagram to open social networks, without any extra work on their part.

Many activists mainly share their work on Instagram because its where they can reach the most people, even if the platform of Instagram itself is in many ways structurally counter to the aims of their activism, because of censorship, shadowbanning and the influences of Meta and its platforms.

This volunteer-run group aims to help activists, artists and creators syndicate their posts to open social networks, such as Bluesky and Mastodon, so that they can begin to grow an autonomous network of communication outside of Instagram, building dual power, while also still reaching folks who are on Instagram. The syndication will be done in such a way that participating activists can always take over their own accounts on the new networks if they would like to. Different folks have different opinions about which new networks are the most empowering, or have the most potential, for various reasons, so our approach is to syndicate posts to all of the networks.

The work of this group will use some tools to help automate the syndication, but there is also non-automated work to do, like reaching out to activists and asking them if they would like to participate, finding creators to contact, and reviewing the syndication to make sure everything is working smoothly.

If you would like to have your posts syndicated, would like to help with the working group, or would like to suggest more folks to reach out to syndicate their posts, please email openbridge@commoninternet.net.

A list of networks that are currently being syndicated is here.