How to find your X friends on Bluesky

Blue sky made headlines this week and brought in millions of new users, with a large wave of users leaving X, formerly Twitter, after the election.

While the Bluesky platform has had its fair share of growing pains since its launch in Fall 2021 and still lacks features found on other social networks, it’s shaping up to be one of the closest things to Twitter 1.0 that many people loved. It is increasingly the place where people looking for an alternative to X – owned by Elon Musk – go.

But even with Bluesky’s growing popularity, making the switch and quitting isn’t easy, especially if you’ve spent a long time on Twitter building up a sizable list of accounts you follow. However, there is a browser extension that should soften the blow of finding your old friends.

Sky Follower Bridge by developer Kawamata Ryō is available for free on the Chrome Web Store and offers a pretty easy way to find your friends from X who have also made the switch to Bluesky. Below we will show you how to set this up.

For more information: How to lock your X messages now that the blocking feature has changed.

How to set up the Sky Follower Bridge extension

To set up Sky Follower Bridge, you must first use the Chrome browser or another Chromium-based browser that supports Chrome extensions. We’ll treat this configuration as if you were using Google’s Chrome browser.

Download to get started Sky Follower Bridge. Pin the extension to the browser toolbar so you can easily access it later.

Create an app password for Sky Follower Bridge

Once you have installed the extension, you can now create an app password for it. This is a more secure way to deal with third-party extensions like Sky Follower Bridge, and it protects you from sharing your Bluesky account password with the extension. Here’s how to do it.

1. Log in to your Bluesky account.
2. Click Institutions on the side panel.
3. Scroll down to the Advanced section.
4. Select App passwords.
5. Click Add app password.
6. Give it a name so you know what the password is for, like Sky Follower Bridge.
7. There is no need to give access to your direct messages, so leave this disabled.
8. Click Create app password.

You will be shown a password that you may only use for renewal. Copy it.

Continue setting up the Sky Follower Bridge

With your app password in hand, it’s time to find the people you followed on X.

1. Log in to your X account.
2. Go to your Profile.
3. Click Next to open all accounts you follow.
4. Stay on that page and click on the Sky Follower Bridge extension in the Chrome toolbar that you pinned earlier.
5. Sign in with your Bluesky username and the app password you just created.
6. Click Find Bluesky users.

From here, the extension will start scanning your watchlist and accounts with matching usernames will appear in a list, allowing you to follow the account from there on Bluesky.

If you run short, the extension lets you specifically search for matching handle name, display name, and handle name in the profile description – all of which are enabled by default. If you still can’t find the account you’re looking for, they may have used a different handle on Bluesky, and the extension won’t help much if that’s the case. Also keep in mind that even an identical username may not be the same person on both sites; in fact, the extension only suspects that this is the case.

For more information, here’s how to delete your X account.