Kick developers off your platform and they’ll go elsewhere. But what if the developer is one of the best developer girlfriends?
Earlier in January, Elon Musk’s Twitter blocked third-party clients on Twitter, including popular apps like Twitterific and Tweetbot. The company did this by citing “long-standing” rules, but added those rules after blocking those apps.(opens in new window) When tap bot(opens in new window) Both have retired their Twitter clients (Twitterific and Tweetbot respectively). This is because there was no way to get them working again.
Meanwhile, Twitter rival Mastodon has gained millions of new users, many of whom are unhappy with Musk’s conduct on Twitter.
Now Tapbots Launches Ivory(opens in new window)is a new iPhone app that takes the Tweetbot aesthetic and many of its features and applies them to Mastodon.
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(Side note: Ivory is a bad name for an app that features an elephant mascot. It’s one of the names I expect to change within the week.)
Elon Musk’s Twitter blocks links to Mastodon, Instagram, and other social platforms.
Snafu name aside, Ivory is pretty awesome. While this isn’t a huge departure from Mastodon’s iPhone client, the app has even more features and is more like Twitter. For example, when you first sign on, you can change your mostly empty timeline to show either “local” or “federated” posts. The bottom menu bar with icons for Home, Mentions, Profiles, Notifications and Search is also pretty familiar.
There are also plenty of options for font type, size, highlight color, and other features that make the experience of using the app more pleasant.
One of Mastodon’s fundamental characteristics is that it does not rely on a single server. Instead, you have to create an account on one of the servers called instances (I signed up at techhub.social which is pretty popular).(opens in new window) instance), each instance has slightly different rules. While this approach has its upsides, it can make the process of choosing the right instance difficult, which I believe is also why many people still haven’t switched to Mastodon. Ivory doesn’t solve this. You have to follow almost the same steps and when you sign up you will be taken from Ivory’s app to your browser. But once signed up, Ivory makes Mastodon a little easier for him.
Ivory costs $1.99/month or $14.99/year, but has a 7-day free trial. Tapbots calls Ivory an “early access” app and plans to add features and fix bugs to the app. Hopefully they start with the app’s unfortunate name.
