So. You've signed up for Mastodon. Things are weird. There aren't quote tweets. How do you recreate your follow lists???
First, a basic clarification – you signed up for a SPECIFIC Mastodon instance. mastodon.social or mastodon.art or federatedfandom or something. You can follow users from any Mastodon instance from the Mastodon instance you're signed up on.
Generally, check the user's profile. You'll typically see something like:
`@USERNAME@SOMEURL.TLD`
The first @ is the username. The second @ is the instance.
Another common way of conveying this is
SOMEURL.TLD/USERNAME, in which case the first bit before the forward slash is the instance url, and the bit after the forward slash is the username. How To Follow Users From Other Instances From Your Own Instance
I'm @kate@federatedfandom.net. I want to follow the user @madecunningly on the mastodon.social instance.
- I log into federatedfandom.net
- In the search, I type in
@madecunningly@mastodon.social - After a second, the search finds
madecunninglyat themastodon.socialinstance! Hurrah! - I click the "Follow" icon (the small blob person and plus icon) on the user's profile
- Now I'm following this user from another instance, and I see their toots in my own instance's timeline! w00t.
Find Your Old TL on Your Mastodon Instance
So, you had a bunch of people you followed on Twitter. You want to follow them on Mastodon now, and it's a pain in the ass to find everyone individually.
There's a couple tools to help you recreate your TL on your shiny new Mastodon instance:
1: Twitodon
This is a tool where you give this site permission to access your twitter account, then you give it permission to access your account on a specific mastodon instance. Then, it will analyze your twitter follows, and tell you any users that exist on the specific mastodon instance that are associated with the twitter accounts you follow.
There's one big catch – how does Twitodon know what Twitter accounts are connected to what Mastodon accounts? It relies on that person having used Twitodon. Otherwise, it doesn't know that BlueBlueFishEye on Twitter is GreenGlassHouse on mastodon.social. :/
This has some pros – you're not relying on BlueBlueFishEye on Twitter having the same username on mastodon.social, for example. For another, Twitodon can also get around the different instance issue – because each user that uses Twitodon has to provide their instance info, Twitodon doesn't care that you are on mastodon.art, it already knows that BlueBlueFishEye is on mastodon.social.
I also really like that Twitodon prompts you to unauthorize their app when you're done. Love some civic responsibility.
2: FediFinder
This tool scans the Twitter profiles for any links in the formats of:
@user@instance.tlduser@instance.tldinstance.tld/@user
in the name, description, location, url field, and pinned Tweet of your Twitter follows. So, pretty handy.
Another perk is that FediFinder will verify if the Mastodon link it finds is rotten or not.
For example, this is the summary I got when I scanned my Twitter follows:
1192 accounts scanned
44 unique handles from working fediverse domains found
12 handles from other services (eg. mail) or unresponsive servers
15 domains are still being checked Retry
Nice.
