Hey! If there are any #EnergyTwitter denizens here who'd like to help make #EnergyMastodon a thing, I've set up a little google form & spreadsheet to accumulate handles for folks to follow. If you want to put your info in and circulate it on the bird site and help new folks get oriented that would be great! #energy #ClimateChange #RenewableEnergy #oott #NuclearEnergy #EnergyPolicy #EconTwitter

Form: https://forms.gle/UorSJKDaUKLBG4CC8

Responses: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GngE-upMxqWdZG_r1SOFTyIZQnyeTAWvZWC4thqeDms/edit?resourcekey=undefined#gid=655244727

Let's organize a Mastodon Energy Community

Let's make it easier for #EnergyTwitter to meet #EnergyMastodon! It seems like a great platform for bringing together people with shared niche interests, away from the sometimes frantic vibes of Twitter. If you'd like more background, Danielle Navarro wrote a great introduction to Mastodon. Enter your Twitter and Mastodon handles in the form below. They will both appear in a public spreadsheet. Put your Mastodon handle in your Twitter bio or display name. This lets us verify that it's really you (the owner of the Twitter account) who entered a Mastodon handle here. It will also make it easier for your Twitter followers to find you using tools like Debirdify. Complete your Mastodon profile and bio. You may want to start out with the same profile pic that you use on Twitter, so people can recognize you immediately. Having a bio and a profile pic also makes it much more likely that someone will follow you back as a new account. Put a link to your Twitter profile in your Mastodon profile (use the "profile metadata" section). This lets us verify that the Mastodon account is really controlled by the same person as the Twitter account. Make an introduction post on Mastodon using the #introduction and #EnergyTwitter hashtags. Feel free to add other hashtags so folks who share your interests can find you! e.g. #ClimateChange #EnergyTransition #RenewableEnergy #ClimateJustice #oott #NuclearEnergy (Note: CamelCase helps screen-readers parse multi-word hashtags correctly for the visually impaired.) Boost #introduction posts from folks you already know and love! We'll compile a list of new accounts every week and do an #EnergyTwitter #FollowFriday thread. Periodically import new follows (very optional): If following a bunch of people by hand becomes tedious, we've added 2 tabs to the response spreadsheet that contain lists of accounts ready for import into Mastodon as CSVs. One contains all the bidirectionally verified accounts (with the profile links mentioned above) and the other is just all of the accounts that have filled out the form. Make sure you use the "merge" and not "overwrite" option when you import!

Google Docs
Well, in about 36 hours we've accumulated >100 folks in this spreadsheet so I should really figure out how the Sheets Python API so we can automate the validation checks.

@ZaneSelvans Hi! Do I understand that the #EnergyMastodon community would be limited to folks who previously participated in #EnergyTwitter ?

What about energy peeps who were tooters first? And maybe mastodon.energy is a logical place for those people to congregate?

@fergusoa Oh gosh no, anybody who wants the nerdy details on energy systems, policies, economics, the energy transition etc.! It's just that there's a very kind, established, and informal collection of interconnected Energy Twitter folks who have been lamenting how hard it is to reconstitute the community over here. By all means follow along and add yourself!
@ZaneSelvans oh great. I was confused because it seems like you need a twitter handle to verify yourself in the spreadsheet.
@fergusoa I've updated the language a bit to make it less specific to the #TwitterMigration

@ZaneSelvans I was just about to ask if you could include formatting to import accounts here. But you already did it!

Are you checking the T<-->M links by hand? Seems possible to automate with the APIs. Probably will also take more time though...

https://xkcd.com/1319/

Automation

xkcd
@gschivley I've been validating them by hand, but yeah I was thinking all we'd have to do to soft-automate it is load both profiles, and grep for the URL. What's the easiest way to hook that logic up to a Google Sheet?
@ZaneSelvans The google API to read/update the cell values? Have a Python script run every 15 min, read each row, determine true/false, then update the row.
@gschivley Last time I tried messing around with Sheets in Python / with Pandas it seemed janky. But it was a while ago. What's the best intro you know of?

@ZaneSelvans oops, forgot to include this link. Not sure it's even worth trying to work in pandas.

https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/guides/values

Reading & Writing Cell Values  |  Sheets API  |  Google Developers

Google Developers
@gschivley Yeah probs not a pandas thing. That was just my previous experience and probably a lot of why it felt janky!
@ZaneSelvans @gschivley I wonder if Apps Script can do this (JavaScript embedded in a Google sheet)
@ThatcherUlrich @gschivley I'm poking around at the Python API and would love to learn how to do this kind of thing anyway. But I have a utility data release to get out this week šŸ™ƒ
@ThatcherUlrich @gschivley But it does seem like there might end up being enough people on the list that it'd be worthwhile to automate!

@ZaneSelvans

Great tool to keep the band together!

There is even a handy tab on Zane's spreadsheet of just mastodon handles to export as CSV and import into your mastodon account.

#EnergyMastodon #EnergyTwitter

@ZaneSelvans just a nudge to consider alternatives to google sheets, docs, drive etc. I use them in a couple of projects, too, as a concession to others. My own stuff is on nextcloud, etc.
@ZaneSelvans against Google, but please add me, if you have the capacity for that
@ZaneSelvans glad to see this is happening! I’d suggest the spreadsheet include a column for full name and maybe affiliation. Thank you!
@derznovich I thought about adding those, but if people want them to be public they're probably already in their Twitter/Mastodon profiles. And if they don't want them to be public then I didn't want to be asking for them.
@ZaneSelvans I respect that. Could it be optional, though? Would make it easier to scan the sheet. After all it, is already optional to add yourself.

@ZaneSelvans

You can follow hashtags here, another good way for birdsite #Energy folks to regroup is to always add #EnergyMastodon and (at least for a while) #EnergyTwitter to posts.

@waltbaldwin Still waiting for the 4.0 update over here!

@ZaneSelvans

it's a good update. we upgraded a few days ago. smooth process with no significant downtime.

@ZaneSelvans

...you can still follow hastags pre 4.0.2.

turn on advanced ui

search for hashtag of interest

click properties icon in search results

pin results

optionally add hashtags by revisting properties

@waltbaldwin I'm doing that already with a few, but there's limited screen space :)

@ZaneSelvans

3 monitors per pc minimum. ;) or just pin all the hashtags to one feed.

@ZaneSelvans Hi Zane: This creates a group @energy
@ZaneSelvans @energy will boost all toots addressed to it to all who follow this account
@ZaneSelvans if "energy" is too general, you can create a new group by tooting to "new name" @ a.gup.pe
@ZaneSelvans "energyecon" already exists (with a paltry 32 followers)