Bounce Beta Now Live!
In early June, we previewed Bounce: A Cross-Protocol Migration Tool. This first-of-its-kind service enables users to migrate their follow graphs between ActivityPub and ATProto with Bridgy Fed as a mediator.
While we thought Bounce's capabilities were incredibly cool, we had no idea it would be received with the level of excitement it ended up getting. In fact, we had the site live a little early, and some eagle-eyed users found it and already migrated their accounts! We're so happy to see the response, and we've been looking forward to publicly launching the service once we've ironed out a few bugs and finalized some of the features we promised.
Today, the Bounce Beta is live and ready for users to try out! You can check it out at bounce.anew.social.
One thing we want to reinforce is that Bounce is a Beta service and is meant for enthusiasts and early adopters to try out and give feedback. Like everything we do at A New Social, the goal of this launch isn't to get the biggest user base as fast as possible. The goal is to demonstrate the capabilities of open social protocols, build people-centered tools in public, and slowly develop these services into something the average user can understand and use, or inspire other developers to do so themselves.
Most importantly, we built this because a credible exit is a central part of the open social web, and a service like this needs to exist for users to make good on that promise. As we've seen recently, a new policy can sometimes bring a platform to make the difficult decision to shut down in a specific region. We discussed the impact of this with Ernie Smith at Tedium last Friday:
When platforms make decisions that have an impact on peoples’ livelihood, whether forced or not, people should be able to escape without having to leave their communities behind [...] The combination of Bridgy Fed and Bounce gives them an exit strategy that lets them preserve their existing communities and relationships
You should never have to leave a platform without your people.
So, with that, let's talk about what you can expect when you Bounce your account.
Things To Know Before You Bounce
We highly recommend understanding the nuances of this migration before running it, and we'll be more than happy to answer any other questions folks may have about it. Here's what you need to know:
Bounce uses Bridgy Fed for migrations: If you're interested in finding out how Bounce works with Bridgy Fed, we covered it in our announcement post.
Bounce currently migrates one-way, from Bluesky to Mastodon or Pixelfed, not (yet) the other way around: In the first Bounce Beta, we can only migrate your account one-way. This is due to a limitation on Bluesky's infrastructure that allows users to leave their servers, but does not enable migrations back in (credible exit, indeed!). Once Bluesky enables migrations into their servers, we'll be ready to launch in the opposite direction. We're also considering inviting non-Bluesky PDSes as a migration option, so if you are a PDS hosting service, please feel free to reach out to work with us!
After you Bounce, you can't use your Bluesky account manually: Since your account is being migrated into Bridgy Fed, you will no longer be able to sign into Bluesky or other ATProto-based platforms and clients interactively, since we do not currently support authentication, posting, or interacting with others' posts using bridged profiles.
If your Mastodon or Pixelfed account is already bridged, we will need to replace the bridged ATProto profile with your existing Bluesky account: Unlike ActivityPub, ATProto does not allow us to "merge" follow graphs. As a result, we cannot merge your Bridgy Fed ATProto profile with the Bluesky account you're Bouncing in. We're considering options to notify your followers on your bridged account about the change, so stay tuned for more details.
If you're Bouncing from a non-Bluesky PDS, we will not be able to migrate your images and videos: If you're migrating from Bluesky, the images and videos on your Bluesky account will stay visible if your account is on a PDS (server) that Bluesky themselves runs. As a moderation policy, we currently don't migrate images and videos from non-Bluesky PDSes, so if you migrate an account from one of those, its images and videos will disappear after a few days. If you are a non-Bluesky PDS and want your users to be able to migrate their media, please reach out!
Bounce's code is open source: Everything we do at A New Social is open source, and Bounce is no different. We welcome developers to review our code, send us contributions they believe will enhance the project, or fork it to provide a service of their own.
We have more FAQs in our docs, so please read those before using Bounce.
Go Forth, Open Social Web Traveler
We started A New Social with a vision of users of the future owning their online relationships. Your communities on the open social web should belong to you, not the platform or the technology used to build the platform. You should be able to take your relationships with you if your current platform fails you or another platform better serves your needs.
Bridgy Fed and Bounce are two crucial pieces of that puzzle, and while we're in the early stages of this mission, we believe today's launch is a leap toward accomplishing that.
Let's liberate our networks and make people, not platforms, the center of our online social experiences!
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 rely on donations to build toward our mission.
If you want to support us, you can join our Patreon or purchase some of our merch!
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 🙏🏼