Bounce Introduces Tool to Move Your Mastodon Account to Bluesky

Bounce, a technology designed to make your social media account more portable across open social services, allows users to move their Mastodon accounts to Bluesky. On Tuesday, the makers of Bounce introduced its latest beta, Bounce 2, which lets you take your Mastodon social graph and migrate or merge it into a profile for your Bluesky account.

With this change, arriving on October 20, users on the open social web will be able to move in either direction: from Mastodon to Bluesky or vice versa. The idea is that this account portability prevents users from getting stuck on a service if they disagree with its development status, terms of service, moderation decisions, or anything else. Instead, they can just take their account and go elsewhere.

Bounce’s cross-migration tool was first introduced in August by the nonprofit organization New Social, which develops technologies designed to make the open social web more accessible and functional.

Today, the open social web includes different underlying technologies, called protocols, like ActivityPub, which powers Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Peertube, Pixelded and others; and the AT protocol, which underpins Bluesky, Skylight and other social applications.

The two protocols do not interoperate, which is why bridges – tools that connect different platforms – were introduced. Currently, users can populate their accounts so that others on different networks can follow their content, regardless of which service they prefer to use.

Bounce is built on technology that was first developed for Bridgy Fed, another tool that connects Mastodon and Bluesky by making user profiles on one service visible on the other.

Originally, the service was able to move a user’s Bluesky account to a bridged account that straddles both networks, and then to the user’s Mastodon account.

With today’s launch, Bounce 2 can now do the reverse: it can move a user’s social graph from Mastodon to Bluesky, or merge it into a bridged profile for their existing bluesky (or atproto) account.

Things are a little different when moving in this sense, the organization notes.

When Bluesky “bounces” to Mastodon, if the Mastodon account has already been filled, the user’s follower lists will be merged, not replaced. Additionally, when you bounce from Mastodon to Bluesky, your original posts and content won’t travel with you like moving in the other direction.

“We believe that services like Bluesky and Mastodon are just entry points into the open social web, but these entry points should not be a trap into another ecosystem,” an announcement of a new social reading. “People should be able to change their minds, use the technologies that work best for them, while still connecting with their people, no matter what they use.”

Bounce 2 launches later this month, and users can support the nonprofit through its Patreon or Merch store.