Xodus

…Building a movement away from toxic social media platforms, towards alternative open social media…

How to escape lock-in social media?

and transition to alternative social media ?

On this page:

Our where-to guide can support you in choosing which alternative social media to use, and setting up your account on alternative social media. After setting up your account, you can use the guides and tools below to build your network and engagement in alternative social media:

Laptop with angry icons of toxic social media, with happy people running away with icons of Pixelfed, Peertube, Mobilizon, Fediverse, Mastodon, Bluesky

Stages in escaping toXic social media – Where are you on the journey ?

Don’t delete your existing social media accounts just yet!  You may need to be able to access or export your data from old accounts, for example you need to download your archived X data to use the openportability.org transition tool. There is also a danger of identity theft if you delete your accounts, as someone else could register the same handle. You could leave your old accounts active and simply don’t use them, or you could freeze them.

  • Step 1 – stop promoting toxic and lock-in social media !  If you send out emails with a link to a lock-in platform, or have a website with links and icons for lock-in social media, remove them !  By including these links and icons, you are pushing people who read your emails and websites into lock-in social media platforms, and providing free promotion to those platforms.  Provide website/email links to your accounts on alternative platforms instead.  
  • Step 2 – stop letting toxic and lock-in social media feed you! Stop reading and engaging with feeds on toxic and lock-in platforms.  Build up your feeds and followings on alternative platforms and read and engage with them instead. 
  • Step 3 – when you are ready, stop engaging on lock-in social media.  Post and engage on alternative platforms instead.
    • Some people and organisations may want to build up their networks and build engagement on alternative platforms first, before being ready to stop posting on their existing platforms (step 3).  However, in the meantime, tell your followers that you are in the process of moving, and most importantly, do step 1 !

You are here: Xodus stages Next: Where-to? Find followers/followings/feeds Get engagement Move your posts

How to set up an account on alternative social media

Here is our where-to guide on choosing which alternative social media to use and setting up your account on alternative social media.

Xodus stages  You are here: Where-to? Next: Find followers/followings/feeds Get engagement Move your posts

How to find followers/followings and build your feed in alternative social media

There are also some useful tools to help you find your X followings and followers, on Bluesky and Mastodon:

X to MAstodon and bluesky: openportability.org

The openportability.org platform, developed by the CNRS ISC-PIF lab (CNRS – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France’s largest public scientific research organisation) and a team of volunteers, and promoted by the EscapeX campaign, enables users to re-establish their X connections in Mastodon and Bluesky.

When you join openportability.org, it will match you up with others you followed/were followed by on X, who have also joined the openportability initiative, using user IDs (so no false matches).  It does depend on your followers/followings also having signed up to openportability. It covers both Mastodon and Bluesky.   To use openportability.org, you first download your X data using the “Request archive” option in X, and then you can get regularly refreshed lists of where your contacts are in Mastodon or Bluesky, as more and more of your X contacts register on openportability and join Mastodon or Bluesky.

In France, more than 30,000 users have already joined the application, making it possible to recreate up to 45 million links between registered accounts.

X / Instagram / tiktok/ facebook to bluesky: www.sky-follower-bridge.dev

www.sky-follower-bridge.dev finds people/accounts on Bluesky who match your followers/followings/friends on several of the toxic platforms, including X, Instagram, Tiktok and Facebook. It uses name/description matching. You give it access to your “migrating-from” account and your Bluesky account and it runs a matching service to find account names/descriptions in Bluesky which closely match the names/descriptions of your followers/followings on your “migrating-from” account. It inevitably suggests some false matches too, but you can easily go through the suggested list and click which of the suggested matches to connect with on Bluesky.

Organic network building

You can also build up your network by searching for a few accounts you are interested in, and if they boost or follow other accounts, check those out too to see if you want to follow them. In Mastodon, sometimes people post lists of interesting accounts on various topics, and some people maintain account directories (on websites). In Bluesky, people have set up “starter packs” which are lists of accounts to follow on different topics to get you going. Keep a look out on websites you visit and email footers you receive for alternative social media icons! And if you have a website or an email footer, put your alternative social media links there! (see engagement section). Some people find it positive to “start afresh” and do this organic network building consciously.

Create your own feed

One of the big differences between the lock-in platforms and alternative platforms is that the alternatives have no black-box toxic recommendation algorithm controlled by a single owner.

On Mastodon, your news feed is populated with posts, in chronological order, from people you follow, as well as posts on topics you follow. You are free to create your own user experience by subscribing to hashtags or creating lists which are subsets of the accounts you follow, so for example at a particular time you may like to see updates from only people in your local area, or only people who post on a certain topic. See this excellent article on how you can customise your feed in Mastodon Does Mastodon and the Fediverse use algorithms? How do I customise what’s in my timeline if there’s no algorithm?

In Bluesky, there are tools for you to create your own algorithm or use algorithms (feeds) designed by third parties of your choice – there is a list of Bluesky feed creation tools (e.g. Graze) and “starter pack” indexes here. 

On PeerTube, you may wish to search for content using SepiaSearch.

Following people/accounts who have not migrated

If there are some important accounts on X you still want to follow, you can follow them through Mastodon by asking MastoX.eu to mirror the account in Mastodon – and there are already many X accounts which are mirrored in that way.

Xodus stages Where-to? You are here: Find followers/followings/feeds Next: Get engagement Move your posts

Organisations ! How to get engagement on alternative social media

If you are in an organisation, or if you are a media or a public figure, growing an engaged community on new social media is key.

Put alternative social links on your website and in your emails!

The best way to get your organisation’s supporters to follow your organisation on alternative social media, is to tell them you are on alternative social media! Many organisations have icons for various social media on their website and in their email footer. So add your alternative icons there !

This is quite simple – it is a icon of the platform which links to the URL of your profile on that platform.

For Mastodon, you can point the link to your profile directly e.g. https://mastodon.social/@xodus_online or use this tool https://mastoshare.link/ to create a link which opens in a user’s own Mastodon server, e.g. https://mastoshare.link/r?account=https%3A%2F%2Fmastodon.social%2F%40xodus_online.

Encourage post sharing on alternative social media !

Many organisations like to help their followers share content on social media by pre-writing a post for them, such as a post saying “I have signed a petition….”. Your organisation can encourage followers to share pre-written posts on alternative social media too!

The text after “text=” is a URL encoded string, you can convert your draft post into this encoded format using a tool like https://www.urlencoder.org/.

Xodus stages Where-to? Find followers/followings/feeds You are here: Get engagement Next: Move your posts

How to move posts to alternative social media

Importing your posts

From X to Bluesky: You can import all your old tweets from X into Bluesky for about 5 euro using blueark.app

From Instagram to Pixelfed: You can export photos from Instagram and import them to Pixelfed by following these instructions: https://www.cnet.com/news/social-media/irked-by-instagram-heres-how-to-move-your-photos-to-pixelfed/

Automatically copy your posts

Tools such as buffer.com allow you to post to multiple platforms at the same time, including Mastodon and Bluesky, and supports the different character limits (Bluesky has a smaller character limit than Mastodon) – this is a paid-for service but has a free version. There are also other paid-for tools like “If This Then That”  ifttt.com .  This includes a tool for automated copying of your Bluesky posts to your Mastodon account (there are truncation issues however). 

This page explains how to automatically sync YouTube videos to your PeerTube server https://fedihost.co/blog/slug/automatically-syncing-youtube-to-peertube

get video content from old social media for posting to the new

If you, or perhaps others in your organisation, used a platform like Instagram or Tiktok create video content, you will find that they don’t let you download your video afterwards (because they want to lock it into their own platform). However, there is a tool to get around that! Paste the link of the video into https://cobalt.tools or https://snaplytics.io/en/ and it will allow you to download the video. Unfortunately YouTube has now blocked this, but it still works for most other platforms.

Xodus stages Where-to? Find followers/followings/feeds Get engagement Move your posts

If your own transition well underway, you might want to help others act!