Bounce Launches to Connect Followers Across Decentralized Social Platforms

At the recent FediForum conference, Bridgy Fed’s creators introduced a new project called Bounce, designed to help users transfer their social network followers between platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon—two decentralized social networks built on different protocols. This advancement marks a significant move toward enhancing the open social web’s interoperability, providing users more control beyond the limitations of traditional social media ecosystems.

Currently, users can only migrate their accounts within the same protocol networks—Mastodon users move between Mastodon servers, and Bluesky users between Personal Data Servers (PDS). However, transferring followers or accounts between networks powered by different protocols, such as ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the AT Protocol (Bluesky), has not been feasible until now.

Bounce operates by using Bridgy Fed as an intermediary, creating a “bridged” account that syncs posts across both networks. The process allows a user to “move” their Bluesky account followers to Mastodon through this bridge, although the reverse migration back to Bluesky is still unsupported due to ongoing platform development.

As a proof-of-concept, Bounce will enter beta soon, primarily targeting technically adept users. Challenges remain, such as the inability to capture interactions from unbridged Bluesky users once the account moves to Mastodon, but the team is developing features to address these issues.

Beyond Bluesky and Mastodon, Bounce also supports Pixelfed and aims to extend compatibility to other open social platforms, including blogging sites and networks like Nostr and Farcaster. A New Social, the nonprofit behind these tools, hopes to simplify the migration process so users can freely choose their preferred platform without losing their social connections.