So you’ve got lastly determined to give up X. If the boosting of paid blue checks and monetized hate did not do it, and the silly title change did not do it, possibly the latest announcement of plans to primarily remove blocking was the final straw to get you to ditch the previous Twitter.
That appears to have been the case for at the least 500,000 individuals who determined to enroll to change into X-pats within the wake of the blocking announcement. That is what number of new customers have since joined Bluesky, the decentralized social media app that originated as an in-house Twitter product and is now certainly one of the most effective and fastest-growing alternate options to what all of us used to affectionately name the “hellsite” (earlier than the title turned really apt).
There’s only one drawback: The right way to discover the group of followers and followees you spent years cultivating on the Different Web site, so you do not really feel such as you’re posting into the void. Properly, there’s an extension for that.
Sky Follower Bridge makes switching to Bluesky straightforward
I signed up for Bluesky shortly after everybody first began freaking out about Elon taking on Twitter, again when it was nonetheless invite-only. Sadly, although a number of individuals I adopted there talked about going to Bluesky, nobody really gave the impression to be utilizing all of it that a lot, and trying to find and including individuals to comply with was a time-consuming endeavor. So I largely did not use it, and felt caught within the quagmire, wanting to go away X however not eager to lose contact with all these of us.
As of late, that is now not a difficulty because of Sky Follower Bridge, an extension for Chromium browsers, Firefox, and GitHub that makes it, if not seamless, then at the least a lot much less tedious to seek out your crew at Bluesky.
This is the way it works: As soon as you’ve got added the extension, head to your X profile and click on on the hyperlink for the checklist of individuals you are following. As soon as on that web page, open up the Sky Follower Bridge extension out of your browser’s toolbar. A popup will seem that may immediate you to log in to your Bluesky account, so have that username and password useful.
Credit score: Screenshot by Joel Cunningham
As soon as you’ve got logged in, the popup will start populating a listing of individuals you comply with on X who’ve matching Bluesky accounts, primarily based on a trio of parameters you’ll be able to click on on or off: Identical deal with title (which means the particular person makes use of the identical @ on each websites), Identical show title (which means the title that shows on their profile, no matter their @), and Included deal with title in description (for individuals who have added their Bluesky deal with to their X profile).
Credit score: Screenshot by Joel Cunningham
From there, you’ll be able to scroll via the checklist and select which of us you need to comply with on Bluesky—and doing so is as straightforward as clicking a button from inside the extension. There is not any “choose all” possibility, so that you do need to undergo and select individuals one after the other, however I discovered this solely took a couple of minutes, even with greater than 200 matches, and it gave me an opportunity to pare down my following checklist, which bought fairly bloated over the 15 years (ugh) I used to be on X/Twitter.
As soon as you’ve got gone via the checklist of individuals you are following, click on again to X and swap tabs to the checklist of people that comply with you and run via the train once more.
Discovering your fellow refugees this fashion is not essentially an actual science, as you will solely see matches for individuals who have really shared both their show title or deal with throughout providers or put their Bluesky title of their X bio, however today it looks as if most individuals use the identical identifiers throughout a number of websites, so your success charge must be fairly respectable.
Personally, I discovered a couple of hundred of each my followers and folks I comply with on X over on Bluesky, and out of the blue my feed there appears to be like much more vibrant—which makes it that a lot simpler to remain off of X.
