Bounce, a project around portability from the nonprofit A New Social, is releasing its own new beta that allows anyone to bring their Mastodon social graph over to Bluesky or slot it into an existing Bluesky profile. It’s a pragmatic step in the direction of account portability between ActivityPub and the AT Protocol, two widely-used (but incompatible) foundations for the open social web.
The release builds off the team’s previous bridging work and looks to make “pick up and move” a real option for users who don’t want to lose followers or people they’re following when trying out new services.
How Migration Works Across Social Protocols
Mastodon, which runs on ActivityPub, an app-level open standard featured by apps like Pixelfed and PeerTube, is designed to connect sites and users across a diverse range of experiences over the web while Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol that emphasizes portable identities and data stores. These systems do not speak natively to each other, so Bounce marshals the move with technology drawn from Bridgy Fed, a long-running bridge that renders profiles and posts visible across the two ecosystems.
Users authenticate to their Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, authorize Bounce, then decide if they wish to migrate or merge. Bounce aggregates the Mastodon follow and follower lists, associating identities where it can, from which it builds up a mapping of personae across to the AT Protocol. If you’ve already asked Bounce to use a “bridged” identity, Bounce now merges networks instead of just overwriting them, which should return fewer inadvertently lost connections.
Importantly, this is account-level portability, not a one-time migration. The endgame — as A New Social reframes it — is to render your social identity fully portable so that you are not locked into any one app’s business model, moderation stance, or development roadmap.
Who Moves and Who Is Left Behind During Migrations
Unlike others, from Mastodon to Bluesky, Bounce has your social graph — the people you follow and who follow you — not just your historical posts. Your old content is still on Mastodon, but the new Bluesky presence begins fresh. If your Mastodon account had previously been bridged to AT Protocol, Bounce merges followers so you don’t lose half your audience.
Going the other way, we can keep things more consistent for what’s shown in the world of ActivityPub posts/replies, but let’s set expectations: DMs, boosts, and some post metadata don’t map cleanly across protocols. Handle mapping is also important; Bluesky’s domain-based handles and decentralized identifiers will need to match so that people following you recognize your identity when the move happens.
On The Importance Of Portability For The Open Social Web
And interoperability is more than a developer pipe dream — it’s a user-rights issue. For years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Data Transfer Initiative have been making this argument that data portability is lock-in reducing, and it affirms people’s meaningful choices when communities migrate or platforms change their policies. Account migration is already a possibility on ActivityPub, but cross-protocol account migrations will increase the available options in the newer AT Protocol world.
The stakes are real. Mastodon has had about one to two million monthly active users, according to its project dashboards, with spikes driven by migrations from platforms elsewhere. For its part, Bluesky announced that it had passed the ten million account threshold in 2024. As audiences disperse, utilities like Bounce give creators, journalists, and community organizers a way to retain reach without spamming everyone with double posts or ditching long-established networks.
Here’s a freelance reporter with 3,000 Mastodon followers. A direct move or merge to Bluesky enables a journalist to preserve core relationships while experimenting with an alternative moderation model or discovery algorithm — without requiring the audience to re-establish those connections.
Starting Out and Essential Caveats for Migration
Before beginning to move, back up your data from both services using their respective export tools. Verify your identity: consider using a domain handle to make verification easy on Bluesky; verify that the information in the metadata and redirects of your profile is accurate, if you plan to maintain a presence on Mastodon.
Expect some mismatches. And it’s not all upside: Not every follower transfers neatly across protocols, some server rate limits may slow down big migrations, and private or limited audience posts aren’t going to come with. If you ever bridged accounts, select the option to merge them in order to prevent your follows from doubling. Bounce is in beta, so edge cases — like subscribed accounts or defunct servers — might need to be cleaned up manually.
Privacy remains your responsibility. Follower lists are public by design; the notion of expecting direct messaging, nudity, etc. to transfer is something that’s quite frankly ridiculous. And consider reviewing the permissions for your apps and revoking access to tools you no longer use after the move.
The Bigger Interop Picture for the Open Social Web
Bounce is based on two complementary visions. ActivityPub’s power is a federated app ecosystem and move/redirect within that universe. The strength of the AT Protocol is portable accounts and containers that allow an easy switch of a provider. Within that chasm is a bridged open social web and a user-centric future in which identity and authority can outlast any one app.
The roadmap of A New Social points to a world in which “follow once, see anywhere” doesn’t feel experimental, but rather routine. That won’t erase platform differences — moderation models, ranking, and culture will still be different — but it relocates power to the users. If a service fails you, Bounce provides an exit that keeps your community intact.
For now, the headline is straightforward: jumping from Mastodon to Bluesky will no longer require starting over. Bounce’s newest release is proof of concept as a button that you can press.
