Hello everyone! This is the new official account of the Debirdify app. It helps you finds out which of the people you follow on Twitter are on Mastodon/in the Fediverse already and follow all of them easily.
Try it: https://pruvisto.org/debirdify
We recommend to keep checking it every few days to see if there are new people.
@n3Rdia @debirdify @digitalcourage No, it works in a very different way and is completely unrelated. Twitodon only knows associations of Twitter accounts and Mastodon accounts of people who used Twitodon before, which is, sadly almost no one.
Debirdify instead searches through the profiles of the people you follow for things that look like Mastodon IDs, which, in my opinion, works much better.
A very similar tool is also Fedifinder.
Thank you! Any idea of the safety of any of these apps .. feeling traumatized by the last 7 years and afraid to log into anything, hahaha!
@SameGirlie When you authenticate you do so on the Twitter website itself (you can check that by looking in the address bar, it says ‘api.twitter.com’). What happens then is that Twitter creates a kind of one-time password that gets handed to the app, e.g. Debirdify or Fedifinder. Twitter tells you what this one-time password is good for, e.g. Debirdify/Fedifinder request read-only access.
This means that they can use that password to read your tweets, timeline, lists, followers, etc. They cannot read your DMs and they cannot change anything, write tweets in your name, etc. But in principle they *could* look at your private lists, the people you blocked, etc. and save that information somewhere, email it to someone, etc. But that's the worst they could potentially do.
Also note that you can revoke the access immediately after using the app in your Twitter settings.
@SameGirlie Both Debirdify and Fedifinder are open-source software, which means that anyone could potentially look at what they do exactly. Debirdify is very privacy-friendly: it does not save your requests or the results on its server. Even the one-time password is only saved as a cookie on your computer.
Side note: Even though it is open software, there is technically no guarantee that the version that runs on the server actually is the same "harmless" code as the one that is made public. So if you care about the privacy of your private lists, block lists, etc. you do have to trust us at least a little bit.
@SameGirlie I am happy to answer any further questions on privacy/security details.
But the short answer is: We promise to not collect any personal data, and even if you do not trust us the damage we could potentially do is very much limited by the fact that we only ask for read-only Twitter permissions.
Thanks, appreciate the info
Debirdify
n3Rdia
Manuel Eberl
SameGirlie