The big news of this week is that Elon Musk bought Twitter, and as such, there’s a large migration of users to the “fediverse” of Mastodon.
I posted a link to my newsletter and blog (for keeping in touch) to Twitter, only to be (helpfully) reminded that I was crossposting to a Mastodon instance! So now I’ve configured the pipes to go the other way, and configured auto-post deletion like I had on Twitter.
Hold, please. Fediverse? What?
Very short, likely incomplete version: there’s a Twitter-like social media experience called “Mastodon” which is software you can deploy as “instances”. Instances make up the federation of instances, or the fediverse (universe… federations…). This statement is either correct, or I’m sure someone will let me know.
There is a major Mastodon instance, but it’s way cooler to find an instance related to something you’re into, common interest, or a geography. For example, there’s a fairly new instance, podpro.biz, targeted towards podcasters! My account is on the jawns.club instance (Philadelphia).
How do I cross-post from Mastodon to Twitter?
There’s a very handy app, https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/. You login from both accounts, and from there you can configure how you want things to be posted.
How do I configure auto-deletion?
Last year I used tweetdelete.net to start deleting my post history from Twitter. I was getting anxious about how much information about myself I have floating around the Internet (still tons!).
If I’m going to post to a Mastodon instance instead of Twitter as a social media interface, I wanted the same deletion (and to delete my fediverse history!).
I was very happy to find that there’s a setting right in Mastodon for this!! Here’s a screenshot, but the location would be [your server]/statuses_cleanup to configure yours.
At this moment, there’s still history on my jawns.club, so I’ll see how this goes. Before finding this setting, I got mildly excited about writing a script for this, and lo, there’s already a setting (great!).
I hope this bit of info helps folks who may be navigating this space in this moment!