Bluesky is steadily growing in popularity as the short form social media platform most likely to become the latest conversation hub over the long haul. I finally joined near the end of last year and am finding Bluesky is getting more of my attention than Threads, X, and Mastodon.
One of the core challenges of Bluesky when you first join is tracking down the people you most want to follow. I started out organically adding people I encountered in the Discover feed and searching for people I know, but this proved to be fairly slow going. What I really wanted was to reconnect with many of the same people I previously followed on Twitter before it was rebranded as X, but the process of looking up all those people proved to be very tedious when I attempted to do it one-by-one.
Luckily, I’m just one of many people looking for this type of solution (you might be too, which is why you’re reading this). There’s a great Chrome extension called Sky Follower Bridge that will help you find users on Bluesky who are very likely the same people you followed on Twitter.
Preparing Your Bluesky Account to Find Twitter Users
The process of using Sky Follower Bridge is pretty straightforward. Start by installing the Chrome extension in your favorite Chromium browser.
In your Bluesky account, go to Settings > Privacy and Security > App Passwords. Create an App Password, which is something that allows other applications to interact with your Bluesky account. You want to name it something memorable so you know why you created it. In this case, calling it ‘Sky Follower’ might be an easy option. Bluesky then generates a password for you to use in other apps.
Next up, you need to open Twitter / X in a browser window and be signed in with your account. From there, tap on the Sky Follower Bridge extension and enter your Bluesky handle and that App Password in the box that looks like the one below.
Tap the Find Bluesky Users button and wait awhile. Depending on how many people you follow on X, this could take awhile. When the process is completed you’ll see a message that looks like this one:
For my example here, the 862 users represents about 28% of the people I was following on Twitter. Further breakdown shows that the matching was done based on having the same handle on both platforms, using the same display name, or having the Bluesky handle included in the Twitter account description.
Next Steps After Completing the Bluesky and X comparision
Once the scan is complete you have a decision to make. You can either manually follow each one of the Bluesky accounts presented on the Sky Follower Bridge screen or you can follow all of them.
For me this choice seemed fairly easy. I did a quick scan of the accounts, decided they looked like accurate matches for the most part, and tapped the button to follow all of them. You might prefer to be more selective.
The process is definitely not perfect. After I followed everyone, I did discover that a few of the accounts were not the people I knew. In most of the cases, it appears that the person who claimed a handle on Twitter was not the person who claimed that same handle on Bluesky.
I unfollowed a couple of these on Bluesky because their content wasn’t interesting to me. In several cases, I’ve continued to follow the Bluesky user because they post interesting content, so in that sense, it was a pleasant side effect of a lazy approach to following.
One final thing I would suggest after you complete the Sky Follower Bridge process is to delete that App Password. It removes the chance that it can be used maliciously in the future and you can always create more App Passwords in the future.
I also removed the Sky Follower Bridge Chrome extension when I was done because I don’t plan on ever importing my Twitter followers a second time, but you may want to run it again in a few months to see if anyone else from Twitter has joined.
BTW, you can find me on Bluesky here.
