How to Find Your X Friends on Bluesky

Bluesky has been making headlines this week, raking in millions of new users, with a big wave of users leaving X, formerly Twitter, following the election. 

While the Bluesky platform has seen its fair share of growing pains since it launched in the fall of 2021 and is still missing features you can find on other social networks, it’s becoming one of the closest things to the Twitter 1.0 that many people loved. It’s increasingly the place where those looking for an alternative to X — owned by Elon Musk — are going.

But even with Bluesky’s growing popularity, performing the switch and ditch isn’t easy, especially if you’d spent a long time on Twitter creating a hefty list of accounts you followed. However, there’s a browser extension that should soften the blow to find your old friends. 

Sky Follower Bridge by developer Kawamata Ryo is available in the Chrome Web Store for free, providing a fairly easy way to find your friends from X that have also made the move to Bluesky. Below, we’ll show you how to set it up.

For more, how to lock down your X posts now that the block function has been changed. 

How to set up the Sky Follower Bridge extension

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. We’ll treat this setup as if you have Google’s Chrome browser. 

To get started, download Sky Follower Bridge. Pin the extension to the browser toolbar for easy access later. 

Create an app password for Sky Follower Bridge

After you’ve installed the extension, you can now create an app password for it. This is a more secure way of handling third-party extensions such as Sky Follower Bridge, and it protects you from having to share your Bluesky account’s password with the extension. Here’s how to do it.

1. Log in to your Bluesky account.
2. Click Settings 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. It’s not necessary to give access to your direct messages, so leave it unchecked.
8. Click Create App Password.

You’ll be presented with a password that you should only use for extension. Copy it.

Continue the Sky Follower Bridge setup

With your app password in tow, it’s time to find the people you were following on X. 

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

From here, 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. 

If you’re coming up short, 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 still can’t find an account you’re looking for, they may have used a different handle on Bluesky, and the extension won’t be much help if that’s the case. Also bear in mind that even an identical user name may not be the same person on both sites — the extension is effectively just guessing that’s the case.

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