Is there any automated way of finding your G+ Friends (that you've circled in G+) on other platforms and following...

Is there any automated way of finding your G+ Friends (that you've circled in G+) on other platforms and following them there?

There's a similar question for each of Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Diaspora, MeWe and so on.

There is a Mastodon-Twitter bridge for doing this, but it seems to be broken currently. In theory this lets you find your Twitter friends on Mastodon. As far as I can guess it's using people using it to build a searchable database of links.

Somebody said: "One problem, among others, is they use different names..."

And I replied: If only there was a unique identifier that most people used. Like email, say, ;) Or mboxsha1sum. Or PGP.

Except Google Takeout, G+circles doesn't appear to contain email addresses even if the other profile has them set to public. And few systems these days seem to use contact emails as a way of finding your existing friends.

Or if only there was an open standard for importing and exporting your social graph. Like FOAF and the rel=me microformat and the various org schemas.

Or like the Mastodon-Twitter bridge, it built a database of links based on the people who used it.

And if only stuff like GDPR and privacy concerns/scares didn't make all of this such a problem.

Time was that every new Social Network startup had a function as part of the joining process where you gave them a list of email addresses of all your friends. They then linked you with people already on the platform, and then spammed all the others with invites. I guess we can't do that any more in 2019 as that pattern seems to have disappeared.

But I do feel like the fall of G+ and the rise of alternatives mean that it's time to revisit FOAF and the various other initiatives to build a platform independent identity and social graph ecosystem.