Sync your Mastodon back to Twitter

Federate your content just one more step, all by yourself, and making jumping ship a little less scary.

[Edit: once upon a time the below was the only way to do this, and there weren’t many other options. That’s no longer true though!

Nowadays, I’d recommend looking at proper tools like https://moa.party/ instead, which handle this much more effectively.]

Mastodon has been quietly building popularity for a good few months now, but over the past 48 hours it’s really burst to life, leaping from 25,000 to 40,000+ users in no time at all.

This is an exciting good thing: we’ve been in desperate need of less centralized and walled social networks for a good long time now.

Moving on from Twitter though isn’t easy, as many of us have been there many years, and dumping all your friends there is a high price to pay. What you need, is a way to sync between them, so you can start using Mastodon, without having to cut yourself off from all you hold dear. You need a way to syndicate your Mastodon posts straight back to Twitter.

Neither service directly supports this, although there are tools you can manage and run locally yourself to do this. Nobody wants to run their own infrastructure though. Let’s make IFTTT do it for us:

1. Get an IFTTT account
2. Connect the Twitter channel
3. Connect the Feed channel
4. Create a new applet
5. Use the Feed channel, ‘New Feed Item’
   (although you could filter your posts here if you like)
6. Use your personal user RSS feed (e.g. https://toot.cafe/@pimterry.rss)
7. Use {{EntryContent}} as your tweet content
8. Save it, you’re done!

To give this a test, post on Mastodon, and click ‘Check now’ on your applet on IFTTT to have it immediately pull your post across. Normally IFTTT checks at least once an hour, but you manually ping the applet here if you want to push it across immediately.

Looks like > 140 character toots get ellipsed (e.g. it takes something like https://mastodon.social/@pimterry/1606047 and ends up with https://twitter.com/pimterry/status/849350679575629825). All other toots that appear on https://yourHost/@yourUsername.rss will come through. That does include public and unlisted replies, but not private ones.

Magic!