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Comment by carlivar | Hacker News Reader

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carlivar

Does the reverse work? Can I reconstruct my Twitter follows by scanning mastodon for Twitter handles?

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Related to this. In the Twitter data export for your followers they list the accountId and userLink but not the handle.

So if you wanted to move to Mastodon you can't just use your export as a source.

You would need to hit their API first to translate which I suspect they will remove at some point soon.

If it ever gets that hostile we can just scrape the website and reconstruct the social graph from the DOM.

Not easily: no cross-instance global search in Mastodon/Fediverse.

This is tricky. I appreciate the decentralization. But there are advantages to a monolith I suppose, like search and discovery.

One person's advantage is another's disadvantage. Lack of global (where global means all servers federated with your own) text search is a choice, not an unfortunate side-effect of federation. There are a lot of things I wouldn't post about if it were like Twitter and people could easily search (and follow) terms looking for people to harass.

Yeah I understand. The hard part for me with Mastodon is I have broad/diverse interests, but so many servers focus on specific topics. And I especially like FinTwit stuff, but the fediverse directories don't even have a "finance" or "investing" category.

If you want? Mastodon profiles have user-definable fields so linking to accounts on other platforms is easy. Not many people are posting Twitter handles right now though.

It's harder because mastodon (it's not even mastodon, it's the fediverse) users wont all be on the same instance and whichever instance you are on might not know of the one they are on. In order for you to appear in a search, someone, somewhere needs to have made 'contact' with you or someone on the same instance.

'contact' because boost / like is included, not just replies.

That would be ripe for abuse. I can easily put in my Mastodon profile that I'm @elonmusk on Twitter, but that doesn't make it true.

Do what Keybase used to do: Post "I'm foo@fosstodon" on Twitter, then put the deeplink to that message on your Mastodon profile.

Scanning tools only have to look at fediverse profiles, not all posts, but can cheaply verify if they are true.

I suspect if enough people started doing that Musk would just ban it.

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