Bluesky’s Best Clients Are Actually Made for Mastadon
Back when Twitter existed, I loved a Mac app called TweetBot. It was a desktop client with a simplified interface, great keyboard shortcuts, and overall less ugly than using Twitter in a browser.
Bluesky is growing very fast right now, but there are no really good Bluesky desktop clients. Of course, we’ve pointed out a few third-party Bluesky clients , but none of them can match the design of TweetBot. Now such good clients are offered only to Mastodon.
There’s Ivory , an extremely good Mastodon client created by Tapbots, the company behind the previously mentioned TweetBot. My colleague Pranay Parab called Mona Mastodon’s best client , and as good as Ivory is, I agree. And I could go on: there are many great options . It would be great if you could use these apps for Bluesky, wouldn’t it? Well, you can.
SkyBridge is a free web service that makes it easy to connect to Bluesky and use it entirely from your Mastodon app of choice. I recently organized this with Mona and I love it. There are a few hiccups, mostly due to features that Mastodon has that Bluesky doesn’t, but if you just want to view your feed and replies, SkyBridge works very well.
To get started, install whatever Mastodon client you want to use and add a new account. When asked about your server, enter ” skybridge.fly.dev “. Here’s what it looks like on Mona:
You will then be prompted to log into SkyBridge. You can use Bluesky’s standard username and password if you like, but for security purposes it’s probably a good idea to create an app-specific password in Settings ( click here to go straight here).
Be sure to check the “Show replies in main feed” checkbox if you like to see every part of the thread on your timeline (leave this unchecked if you prefer to see only the first post in the thread). Click “Login” and you’ll be redirected to whatever app you were trying to set up. It should work now.
Please note that not all Bluesky features are supported. And not all features of your Mastodon client will work—for example, I couldn’t view the most popular news articles in Mona. But the basics—your timeline and responses—work very well. I mainly recommend this if, like me, you are already active on Mastodon and have a client of your choice. This setup means I can manage conversations with both Mastodon and Bluesky users in one app, which I like.