Whether Twitter crumbles remains to be seen, though some signs are telling. Whatever happens, I’m continuing to invest a bit in Mastodon. Last week, I showed how to sync one’s content between Twitter and Mastodon. This week, I’ve set up a Mastodon handle on my domain that redirects to my profile page: I want to explain how I achieved it and the problems I’m still having.

I opened my Twitter account more than 13 years ago, in August 2009. For 12 years, I kept focusing on professional-related content: Java, the JVM, programming, etc. I built my audience, trying to promote good technical content, either my own or stuff that I enjoyed reading. Then, on February 24th, Russia invaded Ukraine. My first visit to Ukraine was in 2014, just after the Maidan revolution. During eight years, I returned there often and made plenty of friends.

During the writing of Learning Vaadin, I create a sample application step-by-step. This application is in fact a Twitter client. Twitter provides a nice API along with its related documentation in order to interact with their site. However, I’d rather deal with a Java API that shields me from all the griity details of the how to let me focus on the what. Hunting for such a component gave me Twitter4j. During my development with Twitter4j, I was stuck with the authentication process.