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Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by ryukafalz on Friday December 16, 2022 @12:19AM (#34010716)
Based on the fact that this is affecting name and bio updates, I strongly suspect they're doing this to try and prevent people from finding their Twitter contacts on Mastodon. For those who don't know, there are tools like Fedifinder[0] that will scan your follows/followers' profiles and look for Mastodon URLs so you can follow them there. They're probably trying to make it harder for people to jump ship.

Even if you plan to stay on Twitter, I suggest you try to rebuild your network on Mastodon too if only as a contingency, because it's likely Twitter's now actively trying to prevent people from leaving.

As another commenter mentioned, very reminiscent of the trigger for the Freenode exodus, where the new owner tried to prevent people from talking about their new channels on Libera.

[0] https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by carlivar on Friday December 16, 2022 @12:41AM (#34010882)
Does the reverse work? Can I reconstruct my Twitter follows by scanning mastodon for Twitter handles?
Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by aendruk on Friday December 16, 2022 @01:01AM (#34011007)
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.
Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by threeseed on Friday December 16, 2022 @01:55AM (#34011489)
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.

Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by mikestaub on Friday December 16, 2022 @09:49PM (#34023861)
If it ever gets that hostile we can just scrape the website and reconstruct the social graph from the DOM.
Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by freiheit on Friday December 16, 2022 @02:30AM (#34011780)
Not easily: no cross-instance global search in Mastodon/Fediverse.
Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by carlivar on Friday December 16, 2022 @09:47AM (#34015052)
This is tricky. I appreciate the decentralization. But there are advantages to a monolith I suppose, like search and discovery.
Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by Kye on Friday December 16, 2022 @10:02AM (#34015261)
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.
Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by carlivar on Friday December 16, 2022 @10:15AM (#34015441)
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.
Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by ryukafalz on Friday December 16, 2022 @10:04AM (#34015297)
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.
Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by progbits on Friday December 16, 2022 @04:48PM (#34020946)
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.

Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by neuronexmachina on Friday December 16, 2022 @08:01PM (#34022962)
I suspect if enough people started doing that Musk would just ban it.
Re:Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for bei... by Fuzzeh on Friday December 16, 2022 @10:40AM (#34015789)
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.