If you happen to’re a kind of of us who arrange an account on Bluesky again in late 2022 however wandered away as a result of nobody appeared to be utilizing it, I am right here to tell you that the decentralized social community is nice now, and it’s best to positively give it one other strive. Particularly in case you really feel freshly motivated to kick your X behavior. Even higher—there at the moment are a bunch of third-party instruments that make the transition quite a bit simpler.
I’ve already written about Sky Follower Bridge, an extension for Chromium browsers, Firefox, and Github that makes it simple to seek out all the individuals you used to comply with on X (and people who adopted you) on Bluesky. This weekend, I examined out one other indie developer device that can even allow you to switch over your posting historical past—that’s, most of your previous tweets—in just some easy steps.
Porto strikes (nearly) all of your posts from X to Bluesky
The extension known as Porto, and it is at the moment obtainable for Chromium browsers (although plans are within the works to cowl Firefox and launch the code open supply as effectively). When you add it to your browser and configure it, you need to use it to import a lot of your tweets and posts to the brand new social app—even people who predate Bluesky’s beta launch in late 2022.
There are some limitations: As of this writing, the extension is simply in a position to load your unique tweets (and associated media). By default, it excludes replies, quote tweets, and retweets, for apparent causes, as that may require additionally importing posts not tied solely to your account. Likewise, Porto at the moment cannot deal with importing any exterior hyperlinks connected to your tweets, so in case you ever tweeted a URL with a remark connected, solely the orphaned remark will seem in your Bluesky profile, minus the hyperlink to no matter you have been speaking about.
On the intense aspect, the extension is extraordinarily simple to make use of, and it is solely going to get higher. Porto was constructed by a trio of impartial builders out of Nepal—undergrad college students Ankit Bhandari, Yogesh Aryal, and Adarsh Kunwar. I talked with Bhandari over e-mail to ask him concerning the improvement course of and future plans for the donation-supported extension, and he instructed me concerning the work that’s already underway to increase its performance.
Retweets and replies have been initially excluded as a result of “we will not or do not wish to import different customers’ tweets,” Bhandari mentioned. Nonetheless, the builders are exploring a couple of completely different choices for bringing in quote tweets and to deal with the problem importing and displaying hyperlinks. Moreover, help for movies and threaded tweets is coming with the subsequent replace, anticipated later this week. Different tweaks embody making it so the extension could be paused and restarted or proceed operating within the background even in case you shut it out.
Make a clear break with out shedding your posts
Bhandari mentioned he was impressed to create the extension as a result of he was an enormous fan of Bluesky’s decentralized ethos—your Bluesky profile is much less part of a selected social community and extra your personal little microblogging web site. It has been constructed in order that if Bluesky itself ever goes away, you can simply take all your content material with you elsewhere. (X is much less versatile, thus the necessity for extensions like Sky Follower Bridge and Porto.)
“I really liked Bluesky’s strategy of customization and moderation, so it impressed me quite a bit to get into it,” Bhandari mentioned. “I believe I joined Bluesky when there have been 5,000 customers, and [was] the primary Nepali to affix the platform…[a] couple of months after BlueSky launched on public beta invite.”
Porto launched about two weeks in the past, and is seeing an uptick in customers as Bluesky grows at a speedy clip—the social community has added some 5 million customers since late October, when Elon Musk introduced X was altering the way in which blocking works on that platform. “Persons are liking the extension, as most people don’t need their previous content material to fade,” Bhandari mentioned, including that the majority Porto customers appear to be people who find themselves deactivating their X accounts. (I am one in every of them.)
Tips on how to use Porto to import your tweets to Bluesky
Whereas importing your tweets is a fairly easy course of, there’s a little bit of setup concerned. The very first thing you will have to do is request your information archive from X, as Porto does not work by logging in to your X profile, however by importing messages immediately out of your offline archive. If you happen to’re fearful about your privateness, think about that all your tweets are already on-line and public-facing. Furthermore, Bhandari defined, the extension uploads and analyzes solely the “tweets.js” file that shops your posts, and does not contact your DMs; importing to Bluesky really takes place regionally, out of your pc.
To request your X information, log in to the location on desktop and click on Extra within the left-hand sidebar. In Settings, choose Your Account, after which Obtain an archive of your information. You will must enter your password once more. Click on Request archive on the subsequent display screen after which…wait round for X to ship you an e-mail notifying you that it is prepared for obtain. (X says this may take as much as 24 hours but it surely took about twice that lengthy for me.)
Credit score: Screenshot by Joel Cunningham
After getting your archive in hand, add the Porto extension to Chrome and log in to it along with your Bluesky username and password. From there, click on Choose a folder and add your X archive from wherever you saved it in your pc. You may then enter a date vary for the tweets you wish to import—and you may go all the way in which again to the day you joined X/Twitter, even when it predates the founding of Bluesky.
As soon as you’ve got set your date vary, click on Analyze tweets. After a second, the extension will let you know what number of posts it discovered to import, in addition to what number of retweets/replies will probably be excluded. Click on Import to Bluesky and also you’re free to wander off to make use of the web as standard—simply do not shut the extension or shut off your pc till it finishes processing.
Credit score: Screenshot by Joel Cunningham
As a result of it is working out of your archive as an alternative of getting to entry X to seek out your tweets, Porto really strikes fairly quick—I used to be in a position so as to add greater than a decade of tweets to my profile in an hour or two.
It may be a little bit tough to determine whether or not all your tweets have been introduced over, for the reason that whole quantity represented in your archive contains replies and retweets that will not make the leap, and the variety of posts the extension tells you it’ll import does not match the quantity that really confirmed up on my Bluesky profile—although this is because of a front-end “information evaluation problem” that will probably be mounted shortly, Bhandari mentioned.
Anecdotally, all of mine appeared to return throughout, together with any pictures or screenshots I shared. I picked a bunch of tweets at random and checked in the event that they’d been imported, and all had. (Bhandari additionally instructed me that because the extension provides performance, operating Porto once more can even allow you to convey in additional of these beforehand excluded posts.)
Credit score: Screenshot by Joel Cunningham
Because the extension runs, you possibly can even watch your Bluesky put up depend develop in actual time—I now appear like probably the most Extraordinarily On-line individuals on the community, with round 3,500 posts, though I solely joined in mid-2023 and began actively utilizing it only a month in the past. Even higher, I can nuke my X account from orbit and by no means, ever give it some thought once more.
