It’s puzzled me why the new Twitter competitors (and please, more and better!) haven’t done something obvious. And because it seems so obvious, there must be a good reason why they haven’t. Enlighten me?
Here’s the obvious idea: When you sign up for BlueSky or Threads or Mastodon or whatever, you give the platform your Twitter handle. You also authorize it to access your account to gather your followers/followed. Then as a step in the signup, the platform gives you the option of following/being followed by the same people when they join that alternative platform.
No doubt, this would require API access, which is, famously, not free. But it would seem completely worth whatever the cost. And even if the API access blocked this, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to trigger a data download and then gather the information from that.
So why hasn’t this happened?
