The Best Bluesky Clients Are Actually Made for Mastadon

Back when Twitter existed, I loved a Mac application called TweetBot. This was a desktop client that offered a streamlined interface, great keyboard shortcuts, and was just overall less ugly than using Twitter in a browser.

Bluesky is growing very quickly now, but there aren't any really great Bluesky clients for the desktop. Sure, we've pointed out a few third-party Bluesky clients, but none that can match the design of TweetBot. Clients that good are, right now, only offered for Mastodon.

There's Ivory, an extremely good Mastodon client made by Tapbots, the company that built the previously mentioned TweetBot. My colleague Pranay Parab called Mona the best Mastodon client and, good as Ivory is, I agree. And I could go on: there are many great options. Wouldn't it be nice if you could use those applications for Bluesky? Well, you can.

SkyBridge is a free web service that makes it easy to connect to and use Bluesky entirely from your Mastodon app of choice. I recently set this up with Mona and I love it. There are a few glitches, mostly owing to features that exist on Mastodon but not on Bluesky, but if you just want to browse your timeline and replies, SkyBridge works very well.

To get started, install whatever Mastodon client you want to use and add a new account. When asked for your server, enter "skybridge.fly.dev". Here's how that looks on Mona:

After this, you will be asked to sign into SkyBridge. You can use your standard Bluesky username and password, if you want, but for security's sake it's probably a good idea to create a dedicated app password in the settings (click here to jump right there).

Make sure to check Show replies in the home feed if you like seeing every bit of a thread in your timeline (leave it unchecked if you'd rather just see the first post in a thread). Click "Sign In" and you will be redirected to whatever app you were trying to set up. It should now be working.

It should be noted that not every Bluesky feature is supported. And not every feature in your Mastodon client is going to work—I couldn't browse the most shared news articles in Mona, for example. But the basics—your timeline and replies—work very well. I mostly recommend this if you, like me, are already active on Mastodon and have a client of choice. Settings this up means I can manage conversations with both Mastodon and Bluesky users in one application, which I like.