So.. after roughly 13 years on Twitter (with different accounts) it became more and more tedious for me to filter out content that was somewhat unpleasant for me. Mainly posts showing me how stupid the majority of humankind has become (but that’s another topic). As I was critical wrt. to centralized and commercial platforms I had a Mastodon account on the chaos.social instance since 2018. However, due to pretty low traffic on Mastodon I mainly used Twitter. Find out more about Mastodon here and here. In case you decide to have a Mastodon account you can check for the existing instances and choose one that fits you and your interests.

Back to me and Twitter.. Somewhere in January (2022) I decided to pause from Twitter for a while. This was all before Elon showed interest in buying the platform BTW - so .. fast forward to this week. During one of my longer runs I made up my mind to return to social networking. However, for the time being not as an active poster on Twitter. The problem that caused the pause just got bigger. But it turned out that many people were moving to Mastodon the past weeks because they were scared by the Elon-thingy. I logged into my chaos.social account and started interacting and posting again. What I forgot was that I had a crossposter installed and that by posting to Mastodon I also posted to Twitter. ;-D So, I am kind of an active poster on Twitter, too. But I have deactived notifications and will only randomly check for any interactions.

But what is crossposter? At least the one I am using (https://moaparty.com) is a web application that has OAuth authorizations (you allow the app to read/write) on both sides (Twitter and the chaos.social Mastodon instance) and detects post on either sides and replicates them to the other side. By that you can be active on both platforms without duplicating posts manually. So, in case you plan a transition phase or just want to be present on both sides a crossposter is a pretty useful tools. Please take the time and inspect the configuration options of the crossposter. Most Mastodon instances would like to see crossposts from Twitter as unlisted posts. Also cross-posts of retweets should be disabled at best. In case of doubt consult the rules of your chosen instance or contact the moderator team.

I was asked which clients I use (for Mastodon). Here I am pretty straight forward: on my Laptop I use the advanced interface of the standard Mastodon frontend. Looks similar to good old Tweetdeck. On my mobile devices I currently use Metatext. Besides being not as snappy as TweetBot for Twitter it does a pretty decent job. On Android I have heard people using Tusk. But as most of the apps for Mastodon are free anyways I see not much risk in trying out different apps and find the one that fits best.

That’s basically all I can share for now. I hope it helps.. :)