Debirdify: find your Twitter friends in Mastodon/Fediverse

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).

Autho­rise With Twit­ter

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:

• ‘@userhost [ 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.