Twitter and Elon Musk are getting dumber by the day. Honestly I have mostly stopped visiting Twitter and spend more time now on Mastodon but it recently came to my attention that you can no longer link to your Mastodon account from Twitter. Essentially Twitter has put up what is a virtual wall and not allowing people to link to their own social media profiles on other sites. You can read more about this stupid policy on the Twitter help page (Wayback machine copy in case Twitter deletes it).

Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

December 2022

Twitter is where the public conversation is happening, and where people from all over the globe come to promote their businesses, art, ideas, and more. We know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms; however, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter.

What is a violation of this policy?

At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:

• Prohibited platforms:

  • Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
  • 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

• Examples: 

  • “follow me @username on Instagram”
  • “username@mastodon.social”
  • “check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”

Accounts that are used for the main purpose of promoting content on another social platform may be suspended. Additionally, any attempts to bypass restrictions on external links to the above prohibited social media platforms through technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) is in violation of this policy. This includes, but is not limited to, spelling out “dot” for social media platforms that use “.” in the names to avoid URL creation, or sharing screenshots of your handle on a prohibited social media platform.

• Example: “instagram dot com/username”

If you want to get around this Twitter stupidity keep reading. Note it might end up getting your account blocked, so I am not responsible if that happens to you. You do this at your own risk.

There is a way to get around this and it is really simple, in fact I created a plugin years ago for a whole different purpose that will help you. If you are using WordPresss or ClassicPress you can go and download my plugin either on the WordPress plugin repository or here on my website and install it. Once it is installed you can create a page on your website with the shortcode from the plugin.

For example here is the shortcode I used on my Mastodon redirect page.

[wpexitpage message=“This is a meta redirect to my Mastodon since Twitter is being dumb.” link=“LGR Mastodon Account” url=”https://mstdn.ca/@lgr” seconds=“0”]

The plugin will display the message on the page, create a link on the page using the link text and the destination url. The seconds parameter is how long that page waits before redirecting. The plugin works by adding in a meta redirect tag on the page and not using Javascript. You can read much more about a meta redirect on the W3C website. Because the meta redirect will actually send the page from your website to the person requesting it it sends a 200 response code and not a 301 response code and in my testing (yes I added this to my Twitter account, because honestly this is dumb) it should work fine. Once you have your page created and published just add your link to your Twitter bio or post and it will link to your new page. You can see it on my Twitter bio here.

If Twitter starts banning all links to their users own websites let them play whack a mole blocking all the websites on the Internet.