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With people moving away from Twitter, mostly to Mastodon, discovering the new accounts became a problem.

For people in the PostgreSQL community I created a website which lists different social media accounts. This website is part of the "PostgreSQL Person of the Week" interview project, however the data source is dynamic, and stored in a different repository. This allows me to keep the repository for the website private, but publish the data for the social media links - this data is public anyway. The interview repository is private, because who wants to see upcoming interviews anyway? ;-)

The interview website is made with Hugo, a static website generator. Normally Hugo looks for content, templates, and other data in the current directory - my private repository.

As part of compiling the website, Hugo can fetch external data, either in JSON or CSV format. This is using the getJSON() and the getCSV() functions, which can be used in Shortcodes, as example.

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.

Image & CC: https://www.pexels.com/photo/3-grey-elephants-under-yellow-sky-68550/

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.