Twitter Plan B
jasonleow • 21 Dec 2022 •
Ok so after writing about platform risk on Twitter and feeling paranoid about things there, I decided to do something about that and set up a Plan B in case things go sideways.
- Replicate Twitter account on Mastodon
- Auto-tweet to a mirror Telegram channel
- Auto-backup my tweets and followers to Google Sheets
Setting up a Mastodon account was initially confusing due to the servers you have to choose. The original Mastodon server were closed to sign-ups, so that didn’t help. The other servers were more niche topical sites which didn’t resonate, or needed manual approval which sucks. In the end, I found the mas.to server which a few indie hackers are on, and went for it. Too bad there’s no easy way to auto-tweet to Mastodon – you got to create a API key in Mastodon, then set up a Zapier webhook to do the auto-tweet via Twitter. Might explore that at a later stage. Btw this is my Mastodon handle:
@jasonleow@mas.to
The auto-tweet idea got me thinking of using my pro IFTTT account, so I set up a applet to auto-message new tweets to a dedicated Telegram channel. So this Telegram channel now acts like a mirror of my Twitter account, and it comes with discussion feature activated too so followers can reply too. I like this setup – I’ve always liked building on Telegram, and run many communities on it. So makes sense to have a personal ‘account’ here to direct people to. The next step is to kill the connection to Twitter and have it auto-message via say Google Sheets. My Telegram channel here:
jason_leow channel
I also created 2 more applets in IFTTT to auto-backup every new tweet and new follower into their respective Google Sheets. That way I at least have a backup of all my content and following moving forward. As for all the followers before, I had a csv file downloaded from one of those Twitter backup apps. So that would suffice.
Things feel more assuring and secure with this Plan B in place.
Now back to regular work! Enough of this Twitter drama and distraction…
Comments
I would love that too. An all-in-one. If not, at least I can download my data in a format that other platforms can read and upload to
@jasonleow Looks like a good plan.
I’ve seen people on Mastodon mention tools for Twitter migration. I think they just look for Twitter users who also have Mastodon accounts so you can export them. One good thing about Mastodon is its support for migrating from one server to another.
I’m looking forward to a (possible) future where something like the Solid protocol for personalized data storage merges with something like ActivityPub and you can just post once and it gets distributed out to multiple networks.