Movetodon: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon | Hacker News Reader

Movetodon: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

movetodon.org

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https://twitodon.com/

https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

https://fedi.directory/

https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/

Seconded, Debirdify is awesome and totally free.

It's also interesting because it highlights what servers people went to. I found the breakdown for me somewhat enlightening. Aha, so these are the types of people I follow.

Kind of a turnoff, it sounds like.

(What you say supports what I've heard, of arguments among the bien-pensant about the "correct" Mastodon server to choose, and automated blocklists of those who choose wrong. I'm pretty sure neither existed when I created my Mastodon account years ago.)

All these tools are great, and I've been using some myself to reconnect my network on the Fediverse, but after 2 weeks I've already started seeing people going back on Twitter, it really feels like it was just a phase.

It's a relatively minor thing but the thing that drove me away from Mastodon was the "content warnings" that are used all over the place. People (ab)use them like they'd use hashtags and it makes viewing the content either annoying (web) or frustrating (iOS app). Twitter provides a vastly superior interface, somehow.

You can turn that off https://mastodon.social/@benjiweber/109388009967277758

You can turn it off on the mobile site, however you will see a header above every post mildly nagging you about the content in high-contrast text (annoying). You can't turn it off at all on the iOS app, as best as I can tell, so you're just going to have to tap reveal all the time (frustrating).

For some reason they decided to elevate random noise to the same level as pornography, forcing you to automatically reveal it all (on platforms that support that feature) or just be annoyed.

It's a minor thing in the grand scheme, but it does leave Twitter in a superior, less user-hostile position.

If by "the iOS app" you mean the first-party one, it's pretty new. There are lots of more mature third party ones. I've found Metatext to be a lot more featureful (and it can disable the content warnings); your milage may vary.

I'll check it out, thanks.

Also worth noting that there are third party _web clients_. People tend to miss this, because the first-party one is part of the core product, but if you don't like the first-party web client, others are available.

(This is actually something I like a lot about Mastodon vs Twitter; the third-party ecosystem seems healthier)

Although I'm not sure the Twitter to Mastodon migration makes sense for everyone on Twitter, I think there will be a good chunk of people that will use Mastodon more frequently than Twitter.

Also, other disgusting decisions from Elno will certainly trigger more influx spikes.

I never really used Twitter in my life, but I've found the Fediverse to be so good I even browse Hacker News much less nowadays. No matter will Twitter collapse or not, this has been quite a lovely addition to my toolbox.

And I love to own my data and have it in EU. And not a single tracker in my instance. And the people I follow are extremely friendly and smart. Thank you!

Mastodon doesn't do any of the things I want out of Twitter, and Twitter continues to function perfectly fine. So little reason to move. All the people I follow are still primarily (or only) on Twitter with a couple having mentioned mastodon backups. (Ah there's one person I looked at from time to time that closed their twitter account, but I can do without.)

as a point of reference, with this and fedifinder, i find about 300 of those who i followed on twitter.

it made rebuilding my network painless.

if you want people to find you with these tools, put your mastodon @username@servername in your twitter profile.

This looks like a refinement of https://fedifinder.glitch.me/. Great job.

This wave is pointless like the move to signal from WhatsApp, unless a critical mass moves it will flop and they'll all be back on twitter

But people are moving in quantity, because tools like this enable the network effect to follow them to the new place(s). So no, this is not pointless.

"Doing the good thing is pointless as long as not everyone is doing it" said every last man to do the bad thing in history.

Don’t do what the world is, do what you want the world to be. Said the others.

(disclaimer : I’ve fully deleted Twitter and Whatsapp last year thanks to enough people on Mastodon and Signal. No, not everyone. But enough to survive).

It's hard to say what critical mass is, and not knowing that, it's hard to say it has or hasn't been reached. Half a million people signed up earlier this week and it's still going strong at a consistent ~2,000/hour. A handful of famous people have also moved and a few others have reserved accounts. Maybe this isn't the tipping point, but maybe it is. In any case, it's not "pointless" for the people who did move. It's community, and a hell of a lot less toxicity (so far anyway.)

Account creation does not equal regular usage. Does anyone know how much people are actually using mastodon?

my timeline feels pretty much identical to how it did when i was using twitter. maybe a bit better. the conversations are significantly better-a massive drop in low-tier/low-effort/annoying comments.

but my experience may be different from others—my circles were already pretty actively looking to get off twitter and the recent changes just put the final nail in.

if you’re interested in infosec, the infosec.exchange community has a massive chunk of former infosec twitter and it’s very very active.

I think the cool thing (regarding toxicity) is that with moderation at the instance level, and instances able to choose their federation partners, there are natural limits that aren't in place with a half-assed moderation in a centralized system.

It's sort of "think global, act local", but for discussion.

>and a hell of a lot less toxicity (so far anyway.

To the most engaged on Twitter, toxicity is a feature, not a bug.

that comparison isn't right because in reality it's about moving people from a single app into an open ecosystem. If Mastodon-like projects have success it's going to be a 30 year, linux-ish thing, not some attenion driven wave. Not to mention if you can spare a few megabytes of disk space you can do both, you shouldn't tell people that using Mastodon means you have to abandon Twitter in the first place.

I mean, that's assuming that Twitter doesn't change dramatically.

For me, the last straw is the planned blanket unsuspension of banned accounts. Twitter's moderation was always weak and inadequate, but life is too short for dealing with some of the complete monsters that that will allow back on. I think I'm done.

(Also, Musk has said that they plan to deprioritise tweets from accounts who don't pay for a checkmark. Literally no-one I am interested in hearing from will pay for a checkmark, so that would make the site largely pointless, even if they weren't doing the "bring back the Nazis" thing)

Worked great and added a few dozen people from Twitter. Encouraging to see people moving over.

People: just text your friends. Social media is an entertainment venue, not real connection

I'm building one too, and plan on open sourcing its code.

There is an irony here that I think most people miss.

That in 6 months everyone will go back?

wow thanks for sharing this! super convenient to hit “follow all” and suddenly have 80 people to follow!

super handy tool :)

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