Elon Musk Is Running Scared From Mastodon; Cuts Off The Best Tool For Finding Your Twitter Followers There

People keep claiming that Mastodon isn’t scaring Elon Musk, but it’s pretty clear that he’s worried about the exodus of people from Twitter. With his bizarrely short-sighted decision to end free access to the Twitter API, driving developers over to Mastodon, some people realized that the various tools that people use to find their Twitter followers on Mastodon are likely to be cut off. It’s unclear if this was part of the motivation for ending free access to the API, but it did create a surge in people checking out those tools. But then, last night, just hours after the API announcement, Elon’s Twitter cut off API access to Movetodon, which was the nicest, easiest to use tool for finding and following your Twitter followers on Mastodon.

As when Musk cut off third party client developers, the company has not said what rule Tibor actually broke with Movetodon. And that’s likely because he wasn’t actually breaking any rules at all.

It’s just that Musk is running scared, because he knows people are leaving.

Either way, if you haven’t yet set up a Mastodon account, and you’d like to more easily find your Twitter follows and followers who have already moved over (and found it much better than Twitter), you should probably do so soon before Musk cuts off those other services as well.

The two other popular ones after Movetodon were Debirdify and Fedifinder. They seem to be working right now, but I’m assuming not for long. Almost certainly not after Musk institutes his fees for API access. So, even if you don’t plan on using Mastodon for now, it might make sense to set up an account before these tools disappear.