Twitter account utility or helpful tool to keep following users

November 17, 2022 5:28 PM

Hello! Like many I am concerned that Twitter will implode and I will lose track of the several hundred artists that I follow. Many of them put URLs of their other websites or galleries in their Twitter 'bio's, or in a single pinned-tweet. Do you know of a utility or website that will do something like, collect and display the bios of the users I follow?

Many of them use popular art websites that collate galleries like Tumblr, Deviantart, Artstation, Patreon, Pixiv, etc so if I find their other galleries, I can try to maintain a username at each of these other sites. I just can't fathom slowly scrolling through my list of 1000+ 'following' users.

posted by panhopticon to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Per the other thread, there isn't a way to do this for free and I still don't have the archive I asked for on Sunday. Given that basically all the programmers quit today, I would not be surprised if the API that other sites use to scrape profiles breaks very soon. Twitter is imploding quite fast so you might just want to start scrolling
posted by JZig at 6:11 PM on November 17, 2022

I don't know of a tool but as an alternative: I'm going to record my screen while scrolling or try full-page screenshots. That's faster and allows time to grab all the details later, even if Twitter goes down.

I'd love a tool though. You'd hope some of the people who resigned could create something to scrape the data, charge a bit for it, and help a lot of people.
posted by rockyraccoon at 6:15 PM on November 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Actually, I was just forwarded a tool that might help, Fedifinder searches the people you follow for Mastodon handles, so could probably be modified to work with websites in general. It's at least worth a try
posted by JZig at 6:18 PM on November 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Okay final post, you actually can make Fedifinder output all scraped accounts by logging in with the button to get any mastodon accounts, and then scroll to the very bottom and pick "show all accounts" to see all the other URLs it scanned. You can download that as a csv or json too from that UI (while it still works)
posted by JZig at 6:29 PM on November 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

This tool will get you their usernames and display names. That won't work for everyone—some people don't reuse usernames and are using a joke display name, so you won't have any replicable data—but it's something.
posted by babelfish at 7:08 PM on November 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Never mind you want bios, that tool won't do what you want but might hopefully help someone else.
posted by babelfish at 7:09 PM on November 17, 2022

Best answer: First I screenshotted my followers list. That took a while.

Only after that did I find out about listfollowers.com, which does what it says on the tin. Worked as of an hour ago.
posted by madcaptenor at 7:48 PM on November 17, 2022 [15 favorites]

THank you madcaptenor! That is exactly the tool I needed before I disabled my account.
posted by muddgirl at 7:58 PM on November 17, 2022

Yes, thank you madcaptenor! Much better than screen caps (which is what I had been using, too).
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:25 PM on November 17, 2022

Tanks also madcaptenor, that's a remarkable tool. Nice interface too. Three nice tidy .csv's.

I hope twitter doesn't go away, I've met (including following up in real life) some great and interesting people there. NZ'ers seem to use it differently (and generally less toxicly) that offshore I think.
posted by unearthed at 8:28 PM on November 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

You're welcome everybody!
posted by madcaptenor at 7:19 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sadly as someone with a suspended account it won’t work for me. I’m glad it’s there though.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 2:45 PM on November 18, 2022