Why You Should (Probably) Not Cross-post from Twitter to Mastodon
So, Twitter is going through some things and you decided to consider other platforms. “Just in case”, you said to yourself, and looked a bit warily into what it takes to get set up on Mastodon.
After getting past the setup questions (“what on Earth is an instance?”), Mastodon looks quite a bit like Twitter. So you decided to “dip a toe in” by mirroring your Twitter feed over to Mastodon. This turned out to be pretty straightforward. Hooray! You're on the fediverse!
Now someone sent you a link to this post and asked you to maybe reconsider this whole automatic cross-posting thing. I sure hope they did it politely. In any event, let me assure you that your presence in the fediverse is very much welcome, and you did nothing wrong.
But .. you should probably stop automatically cross-posting from Twitter to Mastodon.
Context collapse
Because automated posts may contain references to Twitter (mentions or quote-tweets), it's often impossible to view the whole context of a post on Mastodon. Instead you end up with posts that look like this:
This is really important (cc @someperson@twitter.com):
Here's a thread explaining what's going on in China right now.
Note that unlike this blog, Mastodon will display the “user mentions” as non-clickable plain text. See a whole series of these kinds of posts and soon all you're seeing is “twitter.com .. twitter.com .. twitter.com”.
Some cross-posting tools will avoid the “@someuser@twitter.com” syntax and just post “@someuser”. That's even worse; it will often result in the wrong people receiving mentions (@meta on Twitter is a megacorporation; @meta on your server is probably just some rando).
But no matter how you format it, I cannot follow @someperson@twitter.com from Mastodon. I cannot look at their feed without going to Twitter.
It's like I'm hearing some muffled noises from a party next door. I didn't go to the party with the excitable blue bird; I went to the one with the amiable proboscidean. But the chirping just won't stop, and the only way I can fully make sense of it is to go to the bird party: the exact thing I didn't want to do.
Ghostly presences
You may or may not post content specific to Mastodon alongside your Twitter cross-posting. You may or may not look at replies to automatically generated posts. This may be obvious to you. You might think: “I am cross-posting, but I am also here on Mastodon!” The problem is that your audience doesn't know that.
Say one of those Twitter posts with the twitter.com references gets boosted on Mastodon and makes it into my feed. If I reply to it now, am I replying to a robot who will ignore my response? Or to a human who's paying attention? There are very few obvious ways to tell.
This discourages interaction with you, and may make Mastodon seem dead to you. “Why are fewer people replying to my posts here?” Well, it might be because they're not sure you are, in fact, here.
Culture clash
Despite appearances, Mastodon is not Twitter, and is different in some pretty fundamental ways:
Content warnings (CWs): Mastodon has built-in functionality for collapsing sensitive text and images (such as posts describing acts of violence). Different communities in Mastodon have different norms and expectations on when to use CWs, but if you just automatically cross-post everything without CWs, you're not even engaging with the question.
Posting volume: Mastodon doesn't have “promoted tweets” and it doesn't algorithmically curate your timeline; it just presents posts “newest first”. There is also a local timeline: posts from the folks on your server. If you post at a very high volume, it may dominate your local timeline, or flood your followers. Automatic posting means posting in a manner that makes sense for Twitter. It may not make sense here.
Quote tweets: Mastodon currently does not support quote tweets. This may change, but it's worth reading the project's justification for this: “Every time someone quote-tweets to highlight something toxic, it gets their followers to interact with it and continue the cycle.” No matter where Mastodon and the larger fediverse ultimately land on the question of quote tweets, importing Twitter culture uncritically will clash with many people's expectations.
Boosting others: Mastodon has a strong culture of signal-boosting each other. Amplifying other people's voices and content is commonly seen as an important way to be part of the community, even for organizations. That requires looking at what other people are posting, and building a feed that's not just your own stuff.
Alternatives
What if you automatically cross-post tweets that – aren't re-tweets – aren't quote-tweets – do not include mentions?
Unless your feed is completely platform-neutral, you are still likely to run into context collapse. The phenomenon of subtweeting some current trend everybody on the platform knows about is still widespread. You may very well end up cross-posting how you feel about “this site going down the drain” (referring to Twitter) .. on Mastodon.
If you're willing to go through the trouble to curate your cross-posting habits, let me suggest one additional step: just do it manually. Consider if a post is appropriate on a given platform, and if so, post it there. Maybe make some changes along the way, such as adding a CW, looking up a mention, or taking advantage of the larger character count.
The same applies for linking to interesting posts or threads that just aren't on Mastodon yet. Writing a custom post gives you a chance to add context for your audience here.
In short, automatic tools are great for processes that require no human judgment. Interacting with an online community is not such a process.
Better than nothing
While Twitter cross-posting is quite widely frowned upon, there will always be the obvious counterpoint. Surely it is better for a large nonprofit or a major news organization to at least operate a Twitter cross-poster of their own, rather than not be on the fediverse at all. We should all be grateful no matter what!
It's a valid point, but I'm not so sure this is true. The disadvantages above are quite significant, and they degrade the quality of the user experience for a lot of people. There are many ways to keep your audience informed beyond Twitter: RSS feeds, email newsletters, your own website, etc.
In my opinion, sporadic but authentic participation is unambiguously better than automated high-volume feeds. I would much rather see you here, some of the time, than your automated robot self, all of the time.
At the end of the day, Mastodon users like me who are really annoyed by Twitter cross-posts have options, such as adding custom filters. We already have our answer on what to do about cross-posting: we do our best to filter it out, and we don't follow accounts that do it.
The bigger question is: What are you hoping to get from being on Mastodon? And does mirroring your Twitter feed help you with that at all?
(@eloquence@social.coop, public domain, 2022-01-05)