Bounce Helps You Switch Networks
Moving accounts has never been easier.
For the last few months, A New Social has been working hard to support and improve Bridgy Fed, a popular tool for connecting different Bluesky and IndieWeb platforms to the Fediverse. While it does some impressive work under the hood, the team behind it is looking at a new tool to help people seamlessly move across networks, while keeping most of their contacts. This is the core premise behind Bounce.
The Purpose of Bounce
Bounce aims to tackle a distinct problem for the open Social Web: providing an easy way to get onto the network, or move from one to the other.
Starting on a new platform is tedious, and it often makes us hesitant to try something new, even if we know it could be a better experience for us. It’s how we become locked into experiences that, over time, are no longer ideal for us.
Bounce Announcement
“We want to make this process as easy as possible,” says Anuj Ahooja, Executive Director of A New Social, “it shouldn’t have to be rocket science to join a network and find all of your friends.”
Trying to move platforms or, heck, even move instances has historically been a tedious process. Within the Fediverse, a handful of platforms support Mastodon’s “move action”, but the process tends to be tedious and sometimes prone to failure.
How Bounce Works
The main idea behind Bounce is fairly simple: connect two different accounts, and click “Move” to migrate from one place to the other. Under the hood, Bounce uses the ActivityPub and AT protocol to handle migrating contacts. If you’re on Bluesky and move to Mastodon, or vice versa, Bounce handles the accounts on the other network by providing you with your contacts through Bridgy Fed.
Obviously, there are some caveats. The opt-in nature of Bridgy Fed means that your followers only need to enable Bridgy Fed for themselves, if they want their replies to make it back to you. People that you’re following will need to have Bridgy Fed enabled for you to see their posts from across networks. Not every Mastodon or Bluesky user wants to be connected to the other network, so it’s reasonable to assume that some contacts won’t be carried over. Bounce anticipates this by showing just who exactly you’re able to stay connected with.
Future Potential
There are a few areas where Bounce could have a significant impact for the Social Web. One might involve migrating ActivityPub data from one Fediverse platform or instance to another. A more interesting area for opportunity might be to import data and contacts from a proprietary social network, and help people easily find their friends in a new space.
What’s important to understand is that Bounce could end up providing critical infrastructure for user account migration between different networks and services. If the project can make the process of joining the Fediverse or Atmosphere easier for new people, it could have a significant impact on growing both networks as a whole.
This is an incredible achievement by Ryan and Anuj — they’ve made things possible that we couldn’t accomplish before: one big, interoperable, federated social network!
But as users and developers, we should never forget that this is still a bridge. I hope it doesn’t make us lazy, because it fills a gap that should really be natively supported by all ActivityPub platforms: account portability (not talking about moving from ActivityPub to AT-Proto). The current Move feature in Mastodon works well within Mastodon, but can actually cause problems on other platforms. We faced significant challenges in bringing proper Move support to WordPress and have currently paused the initiative, as it isn’t reliable enough yet: https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/milestone/5
So as much as I appreciate both the idea and the implementation, I hope this will remain only a temporary solution — and that we will eventually develop a proper, native one. Otherwise, we risk losing all of our followers if this bridge service ever goes down!