Los Angeles Acting blog by David August: Posting Tweets to Mastodon

Monday, November 07, 2022

Posting Tweets to Mastodon

automatically have your Twitter post to your Mastodon

image of a rainbow colored mystical mastodon lumbering along
Mastodon by David August

So maybe like me you're thinking of diversifying your social media presence beyond Twitter and onto Mastodon. I don't want to have to manually post on both right now, and it is too early to focus just on Mastodon since most of the people I connect with not there yet, they're still on Twitter. I want to build for the future now by posting my tweets on Mastodon.

One way to build a presence on any new site is to have what you post on an old site get posted to the new one automatically. That's where a tool that posts your tweets on Mastodon for you comes in. I was going to try 3 tools to automatically post my Twitter on my Mastodon, and review them all. But the first I tried seems to do the job; I haven't needed to see how the others work. I'll stay with it unless the first one goes offline or stops working. I'll mention the other two here in case when you read this one of them is a better solution.

Without getting too technical, these tools will check your twitter for new tweets, and then post them on Mastodon for you, automatically. That is what's supposed to happen; unless something breaks or goes offline, it should work as designed once it is set up.

Mastodon is not a central company, so everything that runs on Mastodon may not always run as smoothly as a commercial product. Mastodon also does not have a single place to seek answers if you need help or support. Your mileage may vary. So far things often load more slowly with Mastodon than they do with a site/app like Twitter that is run by one company.

Not every Mastodon tool will work with every other Mastodon tool and instance. Instances are what Mastodon calls the servers that run it. They are run by different people, unlike Twitter which is run by a single company. These different servers, instances, can talk with each other. That lets a post (Mastodon calls posts "toots") on one server be read and interacted with by people on other servers. This can delay things. Sometimes if a server is down or out of communication, then the delay can be more than a few minutes.

Every Mastodon server being run by different people can also mean their policies can be different. Different Mastodon servers allow different types of content sometimes, and each have their own privacy policies. The good news here is that there isn't a business model of Mastodon gathering and selling personal information. In fact, there is no single business model behind Mastodon. It is more a protocol than a company or product. Mastodon is like a way you to do what you have always done on social networks, except without single central company running it. It is more like software than a single service.

Here's how to post your Twitter posts on Mastodon.

Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter

The first tool I tried using to send my Twitter feed to Mastodon is the Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter and I set it up at https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/. It was recommended to me and seems to work well.

Upsides:

It can post both ways, Twitter to Mastodon and Mastodon to Twitter. I have only tried having it post my tweets to Mastodon, not the other way around.
It can post images you post on Twitter on to Mastodon too (not sure if it can do this the other way, but it probably can).
The developer seems to be actively connecting with Twitter to make it work well; they mention talking with Twitter support as recently as two days ago.

Downsides:

None yet.

Moa Party

I have not yet used this tool (at https://moa.party/), but Martin Fowler, whom I do not know personally, does and says his Mastodon-aware colleagues have used it without problems.

Linky

Linky is an iOS app (at https://pragmaticcode.com/linky/), that is intended to "Post to Twitter and Mastodon with simplicity." It may or may not automatically post from one to the other. It might be more about posting directly to your Twitter and Mastodon easily from your iPhone of iPad.

IFTTT

IFTTT is a service/site/app that allows many different websites, apps and devices to interact and do things automatically. They do not currently have a publicly available applet (what they call the small piece you can configure to do stuff for you) that will post from your Twitter to Mastodon. If you are open to some coding/technical configuration, you can make yourself a IFTTT applet to post to Mastodon from Twitter (or anywhere else). If you don't already feel comfortable using webhooks, or know what a webhook is, this may be a bit of a learning curve.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions. My current links can probably be found on my linktree or at davidaugust.com. And I’m now on Mastodon at @davidaugust@mastodon.online too.