A crude way to find and follow Thread users from Mastodon

At the time of writing this post it's not possible to follow everyone on Threads from Mastodon. However some are available to follow, it's just a bit hard to know who without painstakingly searching for them.

There are a handful of people I'm interested in on Threads that I want to follow from my Mastodon account, so to zero in on this awkward intersect I've used the following very crude method:

1. Copy down every username from everyone you're following. I tried downloading it but after far too many clicks I was presented with an error so in the end I went to my profile via a web browser and just selected everything that appeared in the 'following' dialog (you need to click 'followers' and then the 'following' tab)
2. Use a curl command and the following URL pattern to return whatever comes back from it:
   curl "https://threads.net/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:USERNAME@threads.net"
3. If what comes back is {"success":false,"error":"Not found"} then that user isn't available, alternatively you should get back some small blob of data which will confirm that the user in question it available to follow from your Mastodon account

The data returned should look something like this:

{
  "subject": "acct:potus@threads.net",
  "links": [
    {
      "href": "https://threads.net/ap/users/17841445266116124/",
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json"
    },
    {
      "href": "https://www.threads.net/@potus",
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html"
    }
  ]
}

I know it's a bit clunky, but it's not something you'll be doing very often. Hope you find this useful 👍🏻