Bounce: Account move from Bluesky to Mastodon and soon the other way round
A tool called Bounce will soon be moving accounts from Bluesky to Mastodon and vice versa. Meanwhile, Mastodon is to receive its own starter packs.
(Image: VCarter80/Shutterstock.com)
A month and a half after the "A new social" initiative presented a tool that allows you to move an account from Bluesky to Mastodon, it has now announced that the opposite direction will soon be added. With the service called Bounce, it will be possible to move a Mastodon account, including some followers, to Bluesky from 20 October, although the two services are based on different protocols. However, the extent to which the two have long influenced each other was demonstrated by Mastodon shortly beforehand, when those responsible for the short message service announced that they were planning their own implementation of the so-called "starter packs" from Bluesky.
Move including all posts
The short message services Mastodon and Bluesky were both modeled on Twitter before the takeover by Elon Musk. However, while Mastodon was the first to benefit from this, the momentum is now clearly in favour of Bluesky. However, the two services are not hermetically separated. Since spring 2024, there has been a bridge through which content can be exchanged between the two. Anyone who wants to can also use it to follow accounts on the other platform. The developer of the service called "Bridgy Fed" is now working at "A new social" to connect these social networks even more closely. The account migration tool was created as part of this process.
Bounce is since "Bridgy Fed" creates an account for each bridge, which copies posts from the original network and makes them visible to the other. When you move, this then becomes the primary account, whereby you can take different parts with you depending on the network. For example, if you move from Bluesky to Mastodon, you can even take all your old posts with you, but not in the other direction. The most important thing for most people, however, is what happens to the followers. Here you can take along all those who have activated the bridge themselves or are already active on the network you are moving to. So far, this is a beta test, so errors are possible.
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While Bluesky and Mastodon will soon grow even closer together through Bounce, Mastodon has announced its intention to take over a popular function of its competitor. Starter packs, which are user-generated collections of accounts that can be followed with a single click, have played an important role in the biggest wave of migration from X to Bluesky to date. There is also one of these, for example, with accounts of heise medien employees. Unofficially, something like this already exists for Mastodon, but it is now to be officially introduced there too. Mastodon is planning more opt-out options for users. Interested parties can follow and influence the development on GitHub, and those responsible are asking for feedback.
(mho)
