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.
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 has to function as something of a middleman, enabling the transition with servers of its own, custom-built for the purpose of bridging and moves.
Currently a proof-of-concept, the technology will launch into beta in a few weeks — but not for the casual user.
“I don’t want to go as far as saying it’s a tech demo, but it was really important to prove that this is possible,” says New Social’s CEO and executive director, Anuj Ahooja.
There are some complications at present, too. You can’t move back to Bluesky’s PDS because the social network hasn’t built out that technology yet, for starters.
Also, if someone on Bluesky who isn’t bridged interacts with your “moved” account, you won’t see that once you’re on the Mastodon side. But the team is working on developing a feature that will notify you of off-bridge interactions, Ahooja says.
In addition, Bounce alerts you to how many of the people you follow aren’t bridged, so if they ever do bridge, you can re-follow them.
Ultimately, the team hopes the technology in Bounce would be obscured from the everyday open social user, who could instead decide simply what app they want to use and then go through a few short steps to move their following.
And while today, Bounce supports Bluesky, Mastodon, and Pixelfed (an ActivityPub-based photo-sharing app), the longer-term goal would be to support any open social platform and protocol, whether that’s a long-form blogging platform like Ghost, or even other networks like those running on Nostr or Farecaster.
“We’re trying to create an interface for the open social web to handle some of these tougher movements that you have to make,” explained Ahooja. “So, if you’re unhappy with something Bluesky is doing — or even if you’re not unhappy, but you feel like a platform on the ActivityPub side is doing something that you really needed to do…[you could] do these couple of clicks on Bounce,” he added.
Bounce is the third project from A New Social. In addition to Bridgy Fed, the organization also launched a settings page a few weeks ago that makes the process of preparing to bridge easier and allows you to set a custom domain for your account.
The overall goal at A New Social is to shift the power of social networks back to the people, not the platform makers, by giving them tools that let them move their account, their followings, and leave if a platform ever fails them in some way.
This motto of “People not Platforms” is now emblazoned on merch A New Social sells, like tees, hoodies, hats, cups, and stickers that help monetize its efforts, alongside its Patreon.
