Okay. Hello everyone. I want to talk about why I built Sky for a bridge. And some of the technical challenge behind it. So my name is Leo, I'm from Japan. This is my first time speaking at an international conference, so I'm a bit nervous. But I'm very happy to be here and very grateful to Bluesky for the support. So I worked very hard to memorize to fast part. But after this, I read from my home. Please give me hi. Let me start. I learned this too because of a personal experience. When Bluesky first appeared, I was very excited.
I thought that was very interesting, so I made an account early. But when I started using it, it fled a little lonely. Why? Because I did not know many people there. Making account was easy. But when I looked at my timeline, the people I usually follow were not there. My friend, my co-workers and people like to read where missing.
So I started doing this by hand. I think many people did the same.
Then I searched for the next person and next person. But if it was hard, it took a lot of time. It was trying, tiring. And sometimes I still could not find the right person because the name was a little different. Well, they use a different account. Then I thought.
On the left, X users. On the right, much Bluesky users. Oh thank you. Let's follow one. Okay, uh check it on Bluesky.
And unfollow. Okay, uh unfollow unsuccess free. And so that's how easy it is to follow users. Okay. Thank you. That's the end of the demo. The uh useful future too. So please try if you're interested, you can use it on Chrome and Firefox. Next, I want to talk about two technical challenges. The first challenge was how to get the list of people of user for all. How do we get the list of people user for us? At first, I thought is use I thought I would use the API, but then X changed that a lot.
For an individual developer like me, that was not realistic. So I changed my approach. Instead of using the API, I use the browser page the user was looking at. The user was already logged in. And the following list was already on the screen. So I built our browser extension. It reads the information directly from the DOM. That becomes the starting point this year. So it also gives me a clear structure. Only the first part depends on each platform. That part is reading the page. After that, the rest can be shared. Searching for Bluesky accounts, showing the result, following account and drawing search.
And because of that it became much easier to support my platform. Right now, X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Threads. Of course, every platform has different DOM, but it is not easy, but this design made mode it much easier to add support for more platform. The second challenge was matching matching accuracy. How do you find the right person? This part was very important. People do not always use the same name across platform. Some things the name is similar and sometimes it's complex different. So find the right Bluesky account is not easy. I use a few methods together.
The basic one are the display name and account name. I also use the profile text because some people put their BlueSky account in their X profile. Recently I add the avatar image matching. Many people use the same profile image across platform, so I use that as a hint. This works better than I expected. Over time, the project also became much bigger than I expected. Now people from many countries use it and it has been downloaded more than 520,000. Thank you. Thank you. When I started this project, I never thought so many people would use it. That is still surprising to me.
And I was very happy to when the Ocean Bruce account shared it and when user told me it helps them. What I learned is simple. When people move to new social network, making account is easy. Finding people again is the hard part. And when we have to do help with that moving becomes much easier. So I want to leave you with one message. Open protocol needs migration too. Open technology is important. But if we want people to really move, we also need bridges.
And what small appendix there are also more attendees from Japan. Masaya is exploring the AD product AT Protocol ecosystem and no Noriaki Watanabe is the author of Swift at Broad. Please say hi if you see them the conference. Thank you.