After last week’s turbulences, many people on Twitter talk about moving to Mastodon. For me the biggest challenge to create an account on Mastodon was to find an instance. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon offers many places where you can create an account, or you can host your own server.
Use Debirdify
Manuel Eberl created the little Twitter app Debirdify. You can connect with your Twitter credentials, and it allows you to scan your followers and the people you follow on Twitter to check if they have a Mastodon username in their profile. Depending on the number of people you follow, it may take a while to generate the list. If it is done, you get a nice list of all accounts grouped by the Mastodon instance:
You can see the most common instances and join any of those who still accepts new users. The Debirdify app offers a CSV export, that we can take and import into Mastodon:
That way you can get a quick start and follow the people you know from Twitter.
A noticeable side effect
The Debirdify app offers you a nice summary of the numbers of accounts you follow and how many of them are on Mastodon. In my case, it looks like this:
We searched 491 Twitter accounts and found 46 accounts with Fediverse IDs, spread over 21 instances.
At the moment not even 10% of the people I follow on Twitter have a link to their Mastodon account put into their Twitter profile. That is far less than what I expected going by all the buzz Mastodon gets in my timeline.
Parting thoughts
Mastodon has its own limitations and differences. Therefore, I am not fully convinced that Mastodon will be the Twitter replacement it currently looks. Nevertheless, with an app like Debirdify we can get a good start and see what Mastodon is all about without spending too much time to configure it.