Millions of new users are jumping to Bluesky — if you’re one of them, you can find all your Twitter followers with this nifty Chrome extension.
Bluesky has 20 million users as of Tuesday and continues to rake in a million new users every day, largely attributed to users migrating from X (formerly Twitter) following the US presidential election. The platform, which launched in the fall of 2021, is becoming one of the closest things to the Twitter 1.0 that many people loved, and it’s increasingly the place where those looking for an alternative to X — owned by Elon Musk — are going.
However, performing the switch isn’t easy, especially if you’d spent a long time on Twitter creating a hefty list of accounts you followed. To soften the blow, a browser extension called Sky Follower Bridge, developed by Kawamata Ryo, is available in the Chrome Web Store for free. This extension provides a fairly easy way to find your friends from X that have also made the move to Bluesky.
To set up Sky Follower Bridge, you’ll first need to be using the Chrome browser or another Chromium-based browser that supports Chrome extensions. The first step is to download Sky Follower Bridge and pin the extension to the browser toolbar for easy access later.
After installing the extension, you need to create an app password for it. This is a more secure way of handling third-party extensions such as Sky Follower Bridge and protects you from having to share your Bluesky account’s password with the extension. To create an app password, log in to your Bluesky account, click Settings on the side panel, scroll down to the Advanced section, and select App Passwords. Then, click Add App Password, give it a name like Sky Follower Bridge, and click Create App Password without giving access to your direct messages. You’ll be presented with a password to copy.
With your app password, it’s time to find the people you were following on X. Log in to your X account, go to your Profile, and click Following to open all the accounts you follow. Staying on that page, click the Sky Follower Bridge extension in the Chrome toolbar, log in with your Bluesky username and the app password you just created, and click Find Bluesky Users.
The extension will begin scanning your Following list, and accounts with matching usernames will begin to appear in a list, allowing you to follow the account on Bluesky from there. The extension allows you to search specifically for matching handle name, display name, and handle name in the profile description — all of which are enabled by default.
If you’re coming up short, it may be because the person you’re looking for has used a different handle on Bluesky. The extension won’t be much help if that’s the case. Additionally, even an identical username may not be the same person on both sites — the extension is effectively just guessing that’s the case.
