So you've finally decided to quit X. If the boosting of paid blue checks and monetized hate didn't do it, and the stupid name change didn't do it, maybe the recent announcement of plans to essentially eliminate blocking was the last straw to get you to ditch the former Twitter.
That seems to have been the case for at least 500,000 people who decided to sign up to become X-pats in the wake of the blocking announcement. That's how many new users have since joined Bluesky, the decentralized social media app that originated as an in-house Twitter product and is now one of the best and fastest-growing alternatives to what we all used to affectionately call the "hellsite" (before the name became truly apt).
There's just one problem: How to find the crowd of followers and followees you spent years cultivating on the Other Site, so you don't feel like you're posting into the void. Well, there's an extension for that.
I signed up for Bluesky shortly after everyone first started freaking out about Elon taking over Twitter, back when it was still invite-only. Unfortunately, though lots of people I followed there talked about going to Bluesky, no one actually seemed to be using it all that much, and searching for and adding people to follow was a time-consuming endeavor. So I mostly didn't use it, and felt stuck in the quagmire, wanting to leave X but not wanting to lose touch with all those folks.
These days, that's no longer an issue thanks to Sky Follower Bridge, an extension for Chromium browsers, Firefox, and GitHub that makes it, if not seamless, then at least much less tedious to find your crew at Bluesky.
Here's how it works: Once you've added the extension, head to your X profile and click on the link for the list of people you're following. Once on that page, open up the Sky Follower Bridge extension from your browser's toolbar. A popup will appear that will prompt you to log in to your Bluesky account, so have that username and password handy.
Once you've logged in, the popup will begin populating a list of people you follow on X who have matching Bluesky accounts, based on a trio of parameters you can click on or off: Same handle name (meaning the person uses the same @ on both sites), Same display name (meaning the name that displays on their profile, regardless of their @), and Included handle name in description (for people who have added their Bluesky handle to their X profile).
From there, you can scroll through the list and choose which folks you want to follow on Bluesky—and doing so is as easy as clicking a button from within the extension. There's no "select all" option, so you do have to go through and choose people one by one, but I found this only took a few minutes, even with more than 200 matches, and it gave me a chance to pare down my following list, which got pretty bloated over the 15 years (ugh) I was on X/Twitter.
Once you've gone through the list of people you're following, click back to X and switch tabs to the list of people who follow you and run through 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 either their display name or handle across services or put their Bluesky name in their X bio, but these days it seems like most people use the same identifiers across multiple sites, so your success rate should be pretty decent.
Personally, I found a few hundred of both my followers and people I follow on X over on Bluesky, and suddenly my feed there looks a lot more vibrant—which makes it that much easier to stay off of X.
