Use This Extension to Find All Your X Subscribers on Bluesky
So you’ve finally decided to quit X. If increasing paid blue checks and monetizing hate didn’t get the job done , and the stupid name change didn’t do the trick, perhaps the recent announcement of plans to essentially eliminate the block was the last straw to get you to quit former Twitter.
This appears to be the case for at least 500,000 people who decided to sign up to become X-pats after the lockdown was announced. That’s how many new users have since joined Bluesky , a decentralized social media app that began life as Twitter’s own product and is now one of the best and fastest-growing alternatives to what we all used to affectionately call “site hell” (formerly). the name was really apt).
There’s just one problem: how to find the crowd of followers and followers you’ve spent years nurturing on Another Site so you don’t feel like you’re posting into the void. Well, there’s an extension for that.
Sky Follower Bridge makes switching to Bluesky easy
I signed up for Bluesky shortly after everyone started freaking out about Elon taking over Twitter when it was still invite-only. Unfortunately, while many of the people I followed there were talking about moving to Bluesky, no one actually seemed to use it very often, and finding and adding people to follow was a labor-intensive task. So I mostly didn’t use it and felt stuck, wanting to leave X but not wanting to lose touch with all these people.
These days, that’s no longer a problem thanks to Sky Follower Bridge, an extension for Chromium , Firefox and GitHub browsers that makes finding your team on Bluesky, if not easy, then at least much less tedious.
Here’s how it works: After adding the extension, go to your X profile and click the link to see a list of people you follow. From this page, open the Sky Follower Bridge extension in your browser toolbar. A pop-up will appear asking you to log into your Bluesky account, so have this username and password handy.
Once you’re logged in, a pop-up window will begin populating the list of people you follow on X who have matching Bluesky accounts, based on three options that you can turn on or off: Same handle (this means the person uses the same @ on both sites), the same display name (that is, the name that appears on their profile, regardless of their @), and the name included in the description (for people who have added their Bluesky handle to their profile X).
From here, you can scroll through the list and choose which people you want to follow on Bluesky, and doing so is as easy as clicking a button in the extension. There’s no “select all” option, so you’ll have to select people one at a time, but I found that it only took a few minutes, even with over 200 matches, and it gave me the ability to whittle down my follower count. a list that has grown wildly in the 15 years (ugh) that I’ve been on X/Twitter.
After viewing the list of people you follow, go back to X and switch tabs to the list of people who follow you and repeat the exercise again.
Finding your fellow refugees this way isn’t necessarily an exact science, as you’ll only see matches for people who have actually shared their display name or nickname across different services, or listed their Bluesky name in their X bio, but these days it seems like most people use the same IDs on multiple sites, so your success rate should be pretty decent.
Personally, I found a few hundred of both my followers and the people I follow on X on Bluesky, and suddenly my feed there became a lot brighter and it became a lot easier for me to stay away from X.