Many people (I don’t like this phrase) are leaving Twitter these days, and looking for a new social media home. One of these places is Mastodon. This blog post aims to summarize the steps necessary for a migration, and includes pointers to websites which can help with said move.
What is Twitter?

Twitter: @ascherbaum
Twitter is a Microblogging service. Users post short texts with maximal 140 280 characters, optionally including media attachments. Tweets (that’s the name for the posting) are public by default, however Twitter implemented the ability to protect accounts (make the content private to followers only), or recently implemented functionality to target specific user groups for Tweets. In October 2022 Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter, and took over as CEO. The following weeks have seen erratic and dramatic changes, which are not well-received by all users. Quite a number of users decided to leave Twitter. In addition, as a consequence of the turmoil some companies stopped doing advertisements on Twitter. The future will show if the users and advertisers will come back.
Users have a unique username on the platform, mine is @ascherbaum.
What is Mastodon?
Mastodon: @ascherbaum@mastodon.social
Mastodon is a Microblogging, which in contrast to the centralized Twitter, runs on decentralized (federated) instances (servers). The instances communicate with each other. The software is open source, and the project started around 2016.
Postings in Mastodon are named Toots, not Tweets. Or Trööt in German. Please let me know the word in other languages, I will update this posting.
After Elon Musk took over at Twitter, users started to migrate to Mastodon as an alternative, and every controversial announcement shows a new wave of users leaving. This will likely keep going for quite a while.
Mastodon users have a unique username on one instance, however the same username on a different instance can be used by someone else. There is no universal verification across instances, instances might implement their own verification. For example the social.bund.de instance is only open to other federal agencies of the German government - therefore every account on this instance is already validated as a government account.
My Mastodon account (the one I’m currently using) is ascherbaummastodon.social. The software allows users to move to new instances and migrate followers over, check the profile settings of your instance how to do that.
Continue reading "Migration from Twitter to Mastodon"