# How I Switched From Twitter to Mastodon, And you Can Too.
Twitter started out like many exciting tech projects. It invented and
then offered a unique "micro-blogging" service, a kind of interactive
RSS feed. Twitter as a company was open to fresh ideas and offered a
lot of features. It gradually became such a big deal in modern web
usage that it, presumably, had to reel a lot of that in. Today,
Twitter clearly can't support all the crazy things people want to do
with it, and has gotten rid of a lot of the features they once
offered, and are frequently criticized for being unmoderated or for
being too restrictive.
Because it's such a part of the modern web, people tend to treat
Twitter as something "we" own. There's certainly a case to be made
that the users of even a closed system ultimately do own it, at least
insofar as losing all users would essentially end the service. Yet the
fact remains that Twitter is a closed source communication method on
the otherwise open HTTP medium.
Can open source solve this technical and social quandary?
## GNU Social and Mastodon
GNU Social is a social communication software for both public and
private communications. It's a micro-blogging platform in which any
person or group of people can run their own nodes of communication,
and also connect these nodes to one another for intercommunication. It
solves the ownership problem in both the literal and emotional sense:
the code, being open source (AGPL), is owned by everyone, and the
nodes themselves are so numerous that users can shop around to find
the right community for them, or start a personal node. Each node,
being independently run and managed, can be used as a private node, or
it can be open to other users, it can block users or feeds, or it can
accept feeds. Control is truly placed in the hands of the users, and
yet the end result is a truly social network.
Mastodon is one implementation of GNU Social focusing on a good, clean
user interface, a low barrier-to-entry for self-hosting, and it's
spreading like wildfire as the premier Twitter alternative. The best
thing about it is that you can tether Mastodon and Twitter together to
ease your transition.
## Joining Mastodon
Part of the advantage of Mastodon is that there isn't just one
Mastodon. The project itself owns and runs
[mastodon.social](
http://mastodon.social), but that's just one node in
a much larger network. You can join any Mastodon instance that is
accepting new users, and you can find a list of running instances on
[instances.mastodon.xyz](
https://instances.mastodon.xyz).
On the other hand, if you like to tinker on servers, you're also free
to just run your own instance. Mastodon is open source, so it's no
surprise that developers have contributed several ways to set it
up. You can run it as a software package on your server, or run it as
a Docker image, or even, experimentally, as a Heroku service.
Signing up with an existing instance is easy. Provide a working email address for account verification and set your desired password. Once you have verified your email address, log in as you would to any other website, using your email address as your login name and your password. Once logged in, you can also set up two-factor authentication.
## Using Mastodon
The default Mastodon web interface is a little more complex than Twitter, but no more than, for instance, TweetDeck. There are, of course, other interfaces you could use with Mastodon, including [mobile apps](
http://tusky.keylesspalace.com) or custom Atom feeds or custom web apps using Mastodon's rich API. Since everyone starts out with the web UI, however, it's a good thing to look at to get used to Mastodon's capabilities.
The web UI consists of four column. The left column is your primary control panel. Most importantly, it contains your username and avatar, and a text field for you to enter you text. It Mastodon, anything you post is called a "toot" (as in a car horn, or, possibly, the sound that prehistoric mastodons made?).
The left column also has several tabs at the top: Get Started, Local Timeline, Federated Timeline, Preferences, and Logout. That's pretty much all you need to know in order to navigate the interface. Here's what each tab does:
**Get Started**
The Get Started view is your current, default view. It returns all the other columns to their default views.
**Local Timeline**
The local timeline contains all posts by any non-blocked and non-muted user on the same Mastodon server. This is different from Twitter, because with Twitter there is no local instance. With Mastodon, you can form communities of users just on one node.
**Federated Timeeline**
The federated timeline is a feed of all public posts happening on all nodes. This is the most Twitter-like view of Mastodon's activity, because it breaks down the concept of nodes and displays at everything happening on the worldwide network.
**Preferences**
There are several options on how to interact with other users on Mastodon, and those settings are found in the Preferences panel.
You can set your posts to be private, or to go only to your followers,
you can set up two-factor authentication, edit your profile, change
your password, add "apps" so that you can interact with Mastodon
through its API, configure email notifications, and more.
### Feeding Frenzy
That's a lot to take in, but the easiest way to start is to just click on the Federated Timeline tab and watch all the excited Mastodon users toot their random thoughts at you in the fourth column.
Interacting with other users is intuitive. You can reply to their post, you can re-post a post that you like, you can follow a user so that their posts appear in your personal feed, located in the second column.
The third column contains notifications. When other users interact with you, you'll see that in the third column.
To sum up:
**Column 1** is your command center.
**Column 2** is your personal feed.
**Column 3** contains notifications.
**Column 4** displays either your local or the federated timeline.
That's Mastodon.
## Mastodon To Twitter
A social network depends equally on the social part and the
network. Mastodon has healthy representation of both. The technology
is stable and robust, so it networks very well, and it's had major
boosts in users ever since it scored some high-profile media
coverage. However, chances are that not everyone you know on Twitter
have migrated yet to Mastodon, so you may want to have your posts on
Mastodon also appear on your Twitter feed. You don't want to have
to do that manually.
You can get Mastodon and Twitter to cross-post with a tool called
[MastodonToTwitter](
https://github.com/halcy/MastodonToTwitter). It's
a Python 3 script that interacts with Twitter and Mastodon through
their respective APIs. On the Twitter side, it takes a little bit of
setup, since allowing Twitter API interaction on your account is
opt-in.
First, you need to join
http://dev.twitter.com to get a consumer key
and access token, each of which permit you to use external scripts to
control Twitter?
Once you create an account at dev.twitter.com, navigate to **My Apps**
and click the **Create New App** button.
Creating a new app isn't nearly as scary as it sounds. In this
context, the "app" really is just a mechanism to acquire login
tokens. Name your app anything you want to, provide a fake description
and a fake website. Leave the callback field empty.
Once your app has been created, you're taken to an overview of the
app. While this does provide your consumer key, you need several more
pieces to enable API access. Click the **manage keys and access
tokens** link next to the Consumer key (API Key) line.
On the Application Settings screen, click the **Create my access
token** button. This generates your access tokens, and displays all
the information you need in one place.
Keep these keys safe, because they allow access to your account
without information like username and password. Do not share them with
others, do not take screenshots of them and post them online.
### Running MastodonToTwitter.py
Currently, there's a bug in MastodonToTwitter that causes it to fail
if you have not yet posted anything to your Mastodon account. A patch
for this has been submitted, so it should be fixed soon, but you may
want to create at least a "hello mastodon" post before running the script.
To run MastodonToTwitter, you must install its dependencies,
pip3, python-twitter and Mastodon.py. Obtaining these on Fedora or similar:
$ sudo dnf install python3-pip
$ sudo python3 -m pip install twitter-python Mastodon.py
Then download MastodonToTwitter from GitHub.
$ git clone
https://github.com/halcy/MastodonToTwitter.git MastodonToTwitter.clone
Change directory to MastodonToTwitter.clone and run the script with Python3:
$ python3 ./MastodonToTwitter.py
The script has a first-run setup mode that automatically launches if
it doesn't find configuration files, so just follow the prompts. For
Twitter, there will be four prompts: one for each key that you
obtained from creating your Twitter app. Just paste in the key codes,
exactly as Twitter provided them.
For Mastodon, you'll only need your registered email address and password.
Once you've passed all the setup steps, MastodonToTwitter runs
non-interactively, silently listening to Twitter and Mastodon for any
activity. Post something to Mastodon, and you'll see it be detected by
MastodonToTwitter, and then in about 30 seconds the same post pops up
as a Twitter post. The same works in reverse.
How you run MastodonToTwitter is up to you. You're free to run in
manually whenever you want to cross-post, or you can set it up as a
cron job so that it runs every hour or two. If you're a very active
Twitter user, you can even run it as a daemon on a server (a
low-powered Raspberry Pi server is pretty easy to set up) so that it
syncs your accounts instantly.
## Join the Federation
The future of the independent and free web is in federation:
independent nodes managed by real people with real and trusted
communities, all feeding into a larger amalgamation. The GNU project,
MediaGoblin, Mastodon, GNUnet, and many others, are working toward
making this a reality. Instead of complaining about being abused by
your Internet corporate sponsors, why not join the Federation? Captain
Kirk did, and things turned out pretty well for him. Give Mastodon a try!
