Migrating From Twitter to Mastodon
Twitter has lots of problems, but it also has the advantages of lots of users I want to follow and some great client apps. I also haven’t been impressed with the alternatives. However, some people I follow are leaving for Mastodon and cohost, so I’m starting to look at them a bit. What I like about Mastodon is that it supports RSS—just add .rss to the end of a user’s URL.
Mastodon is like taking Twitter’s short-form, approachable publishing mechanism and combining it with email’s distributed, protocol-based system. And while that’s cool for nerdy folks like you and me, I understand that it can sound a bit intimidating. Honestly, you can also just sign up for an account and start using it without ever knowing about those underlying technologies.
If you’re migrating from Twitter, though, you might benefit from some of what I’ve learned along the way. Here’s my recommendations for migrating and how you can get the most out of it[…]
Pick any instance except
mastodon.socialormastodon.online, those are run by mstdn gGmbh (aka Gargamel), gigantic, massively overloaded, poorly moderated now and for the foreseeable future. Also don’t join an instance blocked by everyone else, see the list of moderated servers - if in doubt, ask a friend on already on fediverse.[…]
[Content Warning] anything that might annoy or trigger someone. If you don’t do this, you will be rapidly blocked by almost everyone. This is maybe the single most important bit of etiquette.
[…]
Full-text search doesn’t exist mostly; some servers allow searching your own toot text only.
The things is — since I continue to follow a few beloved Twitter accounts thanks to the magic of RSS and one of Nitter instances, allowing me to still consume a lot of tweets daily — I don’t really miss Twitter. Maybe that’s why deleting my account was not as emotional as I thought it would be. To me, it didn’t feel like leaving the party.
Twitter no longer supports RSS, but you can get RSS feeds for individual Twitter users through Nitter or Feedbin.
Previously:
5 Comments RSS · Twitter
>Twitter no longer supports RSS, but you can get RSS feeds for individual Twitter users through Nitter or Feedbin.
NNW can display things that individual Twitter users say with a feed URL of:
https://twitter.com/search?q=(from:USERNAME)
It only shows what they say, including mentions, but not retweets.
I'm not sure if NNW is getting an RSS feed under the hood or not, but it works.
It’s interesting to see people dont want to use their blogs for writing these. Most of the Twitter alternatives can take an rss feed and a blog should be a better writing tool, plus there won’t be a need to migrate in the future. I guess it’s a price + effort vs short term gain balance?
