Bounce: A Cross-Protocol Migration Tool

Introducing: Bounce

Today at FediForum, we previewed Bounce: a new tool that uses Bridgy Fed to help migrate your social graph between Mastodon and Bluesky.

You read that right: we built a service that moves your social graph not just within a protocol network, but across them. And the best part? You get to keep all of your followers, along with many of your follows.

No more trading off between keeping your community and a user experience that serves you better. Your graph can come with you across platforms and protocols, finally putting people at the center of your social media experience!

If you can't tell, we're more than excited and can't wait for you to try it out. We'll have a beta version available for folks to try soon and will share more details in the coming weeks.

Let's talk a little bit about what inspired us to build Bounce.

Why We Built Bounce

We've all been there - you're trying a new social platform, and as you onboard, you need to start from scratch with your entire social graph. Perhaps you go digging around the platform and find people you follow elsewhere. Or maybe you use a service that allows you to sign in with your social accounts and match profiles across different networks.

With those, however, you can only find people who also use the same matching service, and you can only follow profiles; your followers have to rediscover you all over again, making it challenging to rebuild your community.

Starting on a new platform is tedious, and it often makes us hesitant to try something new, even if we know it could be a better experience for us. It's how we become locked into experiences that, over time, are no longer ideal for us.

This is also true if you're on ActivityPub or ATProto and want to move to a platform on the other protocol. You can move within their ecosystems, and it's an improvement, but it still confuses average users who join open protocol-based platforms for the promise of a credible exit. On the open social web, users should not have to ask which platforms they can move to without losing their relationships.

Well, today, we're taking our first step toward tackling this problem. Bounce will finally provide users with a clear credible exit for the open social web.

But we also want to take this moment to explain how this works, how Bridgy Fed comes into play, and show why the bridge is not just a multi-protocol communication service, but also a way to back up your social graph.

This will get a bit nerdy, but trust us - it's worth it.

How We Bounce

To explain how Bounce works, it's important to understand how Bridgy Fed bridges your account between protocols.

Say you have a Mastodon account, and you've enabled Bridgy Fed. Bridgy Fed spins up a Bluesky-compatible account - let's call it a "bridged account" - on our servers and listens to posts you've made on your Mastodon account. Every time you post, your bridged account replicates it on Bluesky. Then, when someone bridged from Bluesky replies, their bridged account replies to your original post.

We don't do this at the API level for each platform, we do this via open protocols, which means it scales to any ActivityPub, ATProto, or web-based platforms with little to no effort.

An important feature with accounts on the open social web is that, as long as they're using the same protocol, you can technically "move" your account from one platform to another. For instance, since they both run on ActivityPub, if I have an account on mastodon.social, I can "move" my social graph from there to flipboard.social, if that's where I want to post from now on. That move maintains all of my relationships and allows me to continue posting without having to re-find my friends. You can do the same thing between ATProtocol-based platforms, such as Bluesky.

We're using that same functionality to "move" your accounts over Bridgy Fed. We take your Bluesky account and "move" it to your Mastodon profile's bridged account, and take your Bluesky profile's bridged account and "move" it into your Mastodon profile.

One great thing about this is that because your Bluesky bridged account continues to exist as if it were your original one, you get to keep all your followers on Bluesky. The only limitation is that if someone on Bluesky who isn't bridged interacts with you, it won't be visible on the Mastodon side. But don't worry, we're close to launching a feature that notifies you of off-bridge interactions, and we'll have more details about that soon.

Similarly, we'll Bounce folks you follow who are also on Bridgy Fed since they'll have a bridged ActivityPub profile for you to interact with. For folks who aren't bridged, we'll keep track of them for you so that if they ever bridge, you can re-follow them. Now, it's our job to bring Bridgy Fed to more users so you can carry over as much of your social graph as possible.

The combination of Bridgy Fed and Bounce enables us to take a leap toward detaching your social network—the people—from social platforms. By joining Bridgy Fed, not only are your posts protocol-agnostic, but also your social graph. Think of it as a way to back up your online relationships in case you ever need to move elsewhere.

Bounce is like a moving truck for your social network, and open protocols make it easy for us to use Bridgy Fed accounts to help you fully leverage the benefits of joining the open social web.

If you're an ActivityPub or ATProtocol-based platform that wants to participate in Bounce, please don't hesitate to reach out. We'll be happy to work with you!

Like What You See? Support Us!

A New Social is a non-profit focused on building tools like Bridgy Fed and Bounce to help center social media on people, not platforms. We're fully community- and self-funded, relying on donations to build toward our mission.

If you want to support us, you can click on the "Support Us!" button below to join our Patreon. Not only do you get the chance to help us continue building out these tools, but you also get a coupon code for our latest merch drop!

If you're a developer looking to contribute to the mission, we'd love to work with you! You can contact us at letsbuild@anew.social, and we'll reply as soon as possible.

A huge thank you to those who've already contributed code, ideas, and reviews to us! We're a small team, and we can't do it without our community 🙏🏼