This website allows you to search the people you follow on Twitter for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts. To use it, you need to click the button below and allow it to communicate with Twitter on your behalf. This is ‘read-only’: we cannot modify anything (write Tweets etc).
Additional Information
How it works
Debirdify uses the Twitter API to look through profile information (display name, bio, website, pinned tweet) for things that look like Fediverse account names. In detail:
- ‘@user
host [ punto ] tld (user[at]host[dot]tld)’ is unconditionally interpreted as Fediverse accounts. From the standpoint of Debirdify, this is the best way to specify your Fediverse account name on Twitter because it is the least ambiguous. - ‘userhost [ punto ] tld (user[at]host[dot]tld)’ is interpreted as a Fediverse account if the host is a known Fediverse host or looks like one (‘social.something’ or ‘something.social’). This is done to avoid false-positives with email addresses
- URLs of the form ‘host.tld/@username’ and ‘host.tld/web/@username’ are interpreted as Fediverse accounts unless the host is in a manually curated list of forbidden hosts. This is done to avoid misinterpreting e.g. TikTok and YouTube accounts as Fediverse accounts.
To our knowledge, this approach is the best one can do. If you have any suggestings for how to improve the situation or you have an instance where something gets added by mistake or not added by mistake, please tell me about it. In general, feedback is welcome!
For news about Debirdify, follow @debirdifydigitalcourage [ punto ] social. The code for Debirdify can be found on Github. Forks, issues, and pull requests are welcome. The person maintaining Debirdify is reachable on Mastodon as @pruvistograz [ punto ] social and @pruvisto:downthetypehole.de on Matrix. Other contact information can be found here.
Why do you need me to connect to my Twitter account?
We need this in order to retrieve any private lists you want to search. For searching followed accounts and public lists, we could in principle offer this service without a Twitter login – however, Twitter has very aggressive rate limiting for such requests, so as soon as more than a handful of people started using it, it would stop working. When you authenticate with Twitter, per-user rate limiting applies instead so that this problem does not happen.
Note that we only request read-only access, so we can read your tweets, lists, account information, etc. but we cannot modify anything or write any tweets in your name. We also cannot read your direct messages. Feel free to revoke the permissions you gave to Debirdify after using it.
Related Projects
- Fedifinder is a tool that is very similar to Debirdify, but was developed completely independently.
- instances.social is maintains a searchable list of many known Fediverse instances. Debirdify uses it to figure out whether a given host is actually a Fediverse host or not.
Privacy information
No information about you or the requests you make is stored on this server. When you autenticate with Twitter, the token returned to us by Twitter is stored in a cookie on your computer for 7 days so that you do not have to re-authenticate whenever you revisit this website.
We do not use any trackers and we do not share any information with any third parties unless we are legally required to do so.
Click here to log out and delete all cookies or here to revoke the permissions you gave to this app on Twitter.
Legal information:
This website is run by: Manuel Eberl, E-Mail: debirdifypruvisto [ punto ] org (debirdify[at]pruvisto[dot]org); postal address: Innrain 122, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
This website is purely experimental and non-commercial. It may become unavailable at any time with out prior notice. We have no affiliation to Twitter, Mastodon, or any Mastodon instances.
Impressum (legal information in German):
Diese Webseite wird betrieben von: Manuel Eberl, E-Mail: debirdifypruvisto [ punto ] org (debirdify[at]pruvisto[dot]org); Anschrift: Innrain 122, 6020 Innsbruck, Österreich
Es handelt sich um ein experimentelles und rein nichtkommerzielles Angebot, welches jederzeit und ohne Vorankündigung eingestellt werden kann. Es besteht keine Zugehörigkeit zu Twitter, Mastodon oder bestimmten Mastodon-Instanzen.