Introducing Bounce, a tool to move your following between Bluesky and Mastodon

Summary

A major development showcasing the potential for the open social web was unveiled Thursday at the online conference known as FediForum. The makers of Bridgy Fed, the tool that connects decentralized open social networks, like Mastodon and Bluesky, developed a new project called Bounce that will allow users to migrate their social network followers across networks powered by different protocols. This is a significant step towards making the open social web a more viable alternative to the locked-in ecosystems provided by tech giants like Meta, Snap, Google, TikTok, and X — and where you may be able to delete your account and export your data when you leave, but not actually migrate your account to a new app. Today, Mastodon, Bluesky, and other social services that run on their protocols (ActivityPub and the AT Protocol, respectively) allow users to move their accounts within their protocol network. That means a Mastodon user can migrate their account to another Mastodon server, while Bluesky allows users to move their accounts and data from one Personal Data Server (PDS) to another. (The latter is still a work in progress because you can move off of Bluesky’s PDS but not back to it!) However, it hasn’t been possible for users to move their accounts or retain their followings by moving from one network to another. Now led by a nonprofit called A New Social, the makers of Bridgy Fed have developed technology that will make this type of migration possible. Image Credits:Bridgy Fed diagram (A New Social) The tech builds on Bridgy Fed to allow users to “move” their Bluesky account to their Mastodon profile’s bridged account (an account that listens for your Mastodon posts and then replicates them on Bluesky so your Bluesky followers can see them), then take the bridged account and “move” it to the user’s Mastodon profile. How all this works under the hood is technically complicated because both platforms have different ways of handling migrations. That’s why Bridgy Fed ha...