I put together a list of steps for a friend to save all the following / followed info from a Twitter account into a spreadsheet, just in case it ever becomes inaccessible, thought I’d repeat it here in case it’s useful for anyone who follows a lot of accounts.
For anyone who is getting anxious about the state of Twitter, and wants to preserve a list of all the people they are following, and whether they have accounts on federated social networks elsewhere, like Mastodon for example, this website may be useful:
It’s heavily used at the moment, so it may be wise to try one of the alternate sites listed on the home page. I tried fedifinder-backup2, which worked fine.
You click on the “Authorise” button which will throw up a Twitter login. You’re going to give it read-only access to all your followed / following info. It puts up an unhelpful message about handles not found, ignore that and scroll down to the “add followers” and “add followed” buttons and click both.
Scroll down again and there are two options to save .csv files.
Fedifinder_Accounts.csv is just the matching account handles that were found on other sites like Mastodon, useful for importing if switching to an account there.
Accounts.csv is all of the data from your account at Twitter: followed, following, matches on other sites, descriptions, URLs etc - very useful for anyone who’s worried about losing track (and if Twitter did actually collapse at some point that info would become inaccessible).
A quick tidy up in Excel (select all cells, then Home>format>autofit column width, deselect all cells then View>freeze panes>freeze top row, then save as .xlsx file) makes it more readable.
Then down to the bottom of the web page and click on “revoke app permissions on Twitter”, click on “Glitch Experiments” in the app list then “revoke app permissions”. Back button twice to get back to the bottom of the Fedifinder page, then “Log out”. Which doesn’t actually work, takes you to the “authorise” page again, click the “authorise to extract handles” button, then on the Twitter page don’t re-authorise, just click on the Twitter user name at top right and choose “sign out”.
Done!
Another popular service being used for this is Debirdify, which also searches out Mastodon matches, but I thought Fedifinder’s way of getting all the data into a spreadsheet was pretty useful.