Larry Hosken: New:

As Twitter continues to implode, people move from Twitter to Mastodon. If you're moving from Twitter to Mastodon, there are tools that look over the list of accounts you follow on Twitter, finds their Mastodon accounts so you can easily follow them on Mastodon. To do this, the tool looks at the accounts' profiles; if the profile mentions a Mastodon account, the tool remembers that.

Those tools are pretty cool, but they couldn't find me. I deleted my Twitter account a month ago to delete my Twitter private messages, worried that they wouldn't stay private. (I didn't predict that Twitter's new CEO would give disgraced journalists internal access; reality is weirder than my prediction. (Though, of course, less-weird abuses could also be happening)) So all those accounts that were following mine no longer did. So those handy tools won't work so well, in terms of helping people to follow me elsewhere. Now that I can, I'm creating a new @lahosken Twitter account whose profile mentions my Mastodon account; a "signpost" account, as it were. And I'll follow the accounts that my old account followed. (Maybe I should also follow accounts that followed my old account, so they get notified of the existence of the new "signpost" account? Hmm, let's see how much energy I have for this.)

I wrote this blog post so that folks will know it's really me at that new Twitter account, not some name-squatter. Sorry for the noise, blog readers.