Bounce Update: PDS Provider Migrations
Today, we're launching a long-awaited feature for Bounce: migrating your Atmosphere account that lives in Bridgy Fed out of the bridge and into a PDS provider of your choice, Bouncing you from the Fediverse to the Atmosphere without ever needing to create an account.
Bounce Back
For the first few months of the Bounce Beta, migrating between protocols required having an account on the ecosystem you were planning on Bouncing to. While this makes sense in the Fediverse, where accounts are tied to a server and we can merge follow graphs, this wasn't an ideal case for the Atmosphere.
While your Atmosphere account isn't tied to a server, you cannot merge two accounts together. This means when we'd Bounce you off of Bridgy Fed, we had to drop your bridged account for the one you're migrating to, dropping the the Atmosphere follow graph you accumulated over Bridgy Fed.
This especially wasn't good for folks who have been bridged for a while and accumulated a following on the Atmosphere. Keeping as much of your follow graph is one of the main points of Bounce, so having to drop the Atmosphere graph in the process was less than ideal.
Another case this fixes is for people who Bounced from the Atmosphere to the Fediverse, then decided they wanted to go back. To use Bounce, they would need to create a brand new account in the Atmosphere and lose the original one they'd made. Now, people can Bounce back and forth between protocols, keeping all their followers and bridged follows, and maintaining a single identity in the Atmosphere the whole time.
We wanted to originally launch Bounce with these features, but we couldn't for two reasons: Bluesky didn't allow migrations back into their PDSes (they do now!) and there weren't as many PDS providers (there are now!). A huge shout out to all the new providers that have made this possible, and services like PDSMoover, Blacksky, and EU-Haul for blazing a trail with PDS migrations.
We have some more upgrades to Bounce in the works, so stay tuned! And if you want a sneak peek, you can watch our presentation at AtmosphereConf that hinted at a few things we're building 👀
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