I’m moving from Twitter over to Mastodon! If you want to stay connected, you can find me at @[email protected].
What the heck does Aves or Mammut have to do with anything? Well, I’m moving from Twitter, aka blue bird site, to Mastodon. Aves is the class that birds belong to, and Mammut is the genus that a mastodon belongs to.
A lot has gone down with Twitter over the past few years, and I decided I wanted out. I heard about Mastodon some time ago and kept it on my radar, and with the recent events, I decided to make the move.
I set up a Mastodon instance called Pawsitiv Space, and plan to use it as my main social media platform. If you’d like to join me there, you can sign up at social.pawsitiv.space. I think it’ll likely become my main social media platform, but I’ll still be on Discord and Telegram, of course.
I also plan to start using this blog, which is why I made it in the first place. So, expect longer form content here, and shorter form posts on Pawsitiv Space. I’ll likely link to my posts here from Pawsitiv Space.
I haven’t been on Twitter for a few weeks now, and I miss seeing the updates from my friends. I’ll probably start keeping tabs on Twitter again, but I’ll be using it as a read-only platform. I am expecting to continue seeing people moving to the Fediverse.
I hope you’ll join me in the Fediverse! Whether on Pawsitiv Space or elsewhere, follow me with my username above.
Joining me in the Fediverse#
If you’ve been considering a move to Mastodon, this is meant to help with that. I’ve valued being connected to so many people online and on Twitter so I’m sharing the following notes (Adapted from @[email protected]) about joining The “Fediverse” via Mastodon. If you are thinking of starting up your own Mastodon instance (which is a cool thing to do!) then PLEASE read this first… https://hackers.town/@thraeryn/109388180266512007
-
If you want to stay in touch with me in a post-Twitter world, you can find where I’m at on my Lynx.
-
I have joined the Fediverse and am currently on Pawsitiv Spaces’s Mastodon Instance (https://social.pawsitiv.space/@tarper24). I started this up myself, and while I’m new to the Fediverse, I plan to do my best running it! You can sign up here: https://social.pawsitiv.space/auth/sign_up You don’t have to be a member of that instance to connect with me, however. If you join any Mastodon instance which is federated with the overall network, you can connect with and follow all your friends, even if they are on other instances/servers. If you are searching for a community to join, https://instances.social has a considerable list of options. Also, while it is a bit fiddly, it is possible to migrate from one instance to another if you change your mind about where you’d like your Mastodon profile to live down the road. If you want to better understand all the buzz about Mastodon, check out DeviantOllam’s video: https://youtu.be/P-jYZLs2j1Q I also made a blog post on some of the features on Pawsitiv Space: https://pawsitiv.space/posts/2023/01/27/understanding-and-using-mastodon-glitch-edition/
-
If you still have your old Twitter account when you are joining the Fediverse, many folk report that it’s a good idea to be as consistent as possible if you want to reconnect with old friends and communities… keeping the same profile photo / avatar / username / etc is often recommended. Putting your Mastodon profile link in your Twitter bio, etc, is also a common practice. Some of the best ways to keep connected with folk are the following tools. This free tool – https://fedifinder.glitch.me – will scour all of your Twitter friends’ accounts (checking their pinned tweets, profile data, etc) to see if any of them have said that they’re also joining Mastodon. That tool then allows you to download a CSV file with links to your friends’ new profiles. You can import that CSV file directly into Mastodon and become connected with them all in one step. There’s a similar tool called MoveToDon – https://www.movetodon.org – which offers related functionality. I really like the Fedifinder tool, personally, since its latest version incorporates both the above step as well as the following step…
-
You may have many Twitter friends or followers who have not stated that they have a Mastodon profile yet, but perhaps you want to preserve a list of them so that you can keep trying to reach out and connect with them later. This free tool can export your Twitter following/followers into downloadable lists for you to save… https://unflwrs.syfaro.com
-
If you have concerns about what may happen to your personal information and Twitter data when that site fails completely and eventually gets sold for scrap, there are a number of tools that work rather smoothly. Journalist and privacy advocate Micah F Lee created Semiphemeral (https://semiphemeral.com) a tool for deleting Tweets and DMs. I have long used the premium (paid) version of the service TweetEraser (https://www.tweeteraser.com) which I found very effective. Both such tools can only “look backward” into your account a limited amount. For accounts with a very large number of tweets in their history, it typically becomes necessary to download your Twitter Data Archive and then upload your tweet history database (but not re-upload all of your media and such) to whatever scrubber tool you are using, so that the tool can properly index and target all of the tweets and likes and such in your history. If it’s exclusively your DMs that you care about purging (or if the “retrieve my Twitter data archive” function has become broken but you still want to at least purge your DMs) then there is a scripting tool called “DM Destroyer” (https://dmdestroyer.com) created by Jackie Singh (@HackingButLegal) which is purchased for a small fee and can run locally in the Chrome web browser’s console. While the script is a bit fiddly (it gets “stuck” on Group DMs which you have to leave manually, then the script will resume) it does a decent job compared with trying to clear your DMs manually. NOTE: as with any such service, there is limited regulatory oversight in the USA due to our weak privacy laws… and just how “deleted” your data is if you purge it from a service like Twitter cannot be guaranteed. But taking these steps can bring some limited peace of mind. I regularly use tools like this and will continue to do so as things come to an end at Twitter.
-
If you have content on Twitter, either your own posts or important threads that you’ve bookmarked, that you are sad about seeing vanish you can preserve things a few ways. Your own Twitter archive (mentioned above in the TweetEraser section) will have all of your content, including images and videos, etc. If you want to preserve someone else’s threads then the Archive Social tool – https://archive.social – is a great way to do that. Go through the threads that you reference often and collect them into downloadable PDFs, etc, with that tool.
See you soon, I hope. Stay safe out there! 👍
Last modified: