Abstract

The current situation with Twitter exodus to Mastodon seems like an almost perfect environment for StigPeople. There are thousands if not millions of people looking for who to follow on Mastodon, and few if any really effective ways to figure out who to follow

We can harvest Mastodon names from Twitter and associate them with their twitter history/signature/networks.

Then make it easy to find and mark Mastodon names so others of like mind can follow.

Approach

• Periodically crawl a few thousand key Twitter lists
• Harvest any new Mastodon handles from that
• Add each Twitter user with a Mastodon handle to a graph db with metadata
• Elaborate nodes and edges with relevant Twitter data to make discovery and navigation easy
• Use network centrality to provide authoritativeness rankings
• UX to meander through the graph
• Create a Mark when you follow someone on Mastodon
• Algorithmic UX affordances for behavior influenced by such marks
• Make it easy for anyone to crawl their own lists and add to the graph

Initial Results

Here's the first result, 17k+ people from Twitter who have Mastodon handles on their accounts. Dominated by tech/marketing...

Science Mastodon - done the same way

Science Mastodon a week later, 80% increase

Next Steps

• Add nodes to graph as new Mastodon accounts show up