Social

Mar 6, 2025 ∞

Phoenix Rises From the Ashes of Tweetbot to Join Ivory

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the surprisingly small amount of third-party Bluesky clients for iOS. After countless Twitter ones and now plenty of Mastodon options, it felt inevitable. Except very few developers seemed to be working on anything.

For months, users (including me) had been holding out hope that Tapbots, the makers of Ivory and the now sunsetted Tweetbot, would make a Bluesky client. Much to my surprise, yesterday they announced Phoenix, the Bluesky counterpart to Ivory. I am extraordinarily excited about this app. Having been a champion for Bluesky and Tapbots products, this is an awfully fun development for me. While they did not share any screenshots and it seems to be fairly early, in fact they don’t expect to start releasing anything until this summer, they did share a gorgeous new logo and a reddish orange take on their iconic robotic bird. It is not hard to imagine that Phoenix could be nearly identical to Ivory for the most part with tweaks to accommodate some platform specific features. After all Ivory is very similar to the final version of Tweetbot with changes for Mastodon’s unique structure.

Congrats to the Tapbots crew. I think this is going to be a great new product for their portfolio and it expands their potential user base by quite a substantial amount. And before I leave you, I just have to hit on the name Phoenix. It is such a perfect moniker for a Bluesky client, particularly one made by the team who created Tweetbot. It was devastating to lose that app a few years ago and with Bluesky having been born out of Twitter itself, it is only natural that it should be named for the mythical bird that dies in a fiery catastrophe, only to rise right up out of those ashes even better than before.

Feb 13, 2025 ∞

What Remains of the Clients We Loved

I’ve downloaded thousands of apps as an iOS aficionado since day one. But none have typically inspired me as much as the third-party social media clients that helped build the industry as we know it today. I’m talking about Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Echofon, Twittelator, Tweetie, Alien Blue, Apollo, Narwhal, Comet, among many others. These apps all found ways to offer unique experiences to users that improved upon the original product. In some of these cases, apps were acquired by the platform and twisted and reshaped into first-party clients like Tweetie and Alien Blue which became the X and Reddit apps we have today. Now they are largely unrecognizable as their original third-party predecessors. That’s unfortunate. It’s even more unfortunate that X and Reddit have changed the way they offer their APIs leading to no clients in the case of X and substantially fewer ones in the case of Reddit.

Thankfully, there’s Mastodon and Bluesky and a handful of Reddit developers willing to put up with the current API situation. I find myself frequently reminiscing about the clients of old and am always on the hunt for the best iOS apps so I wanted to talk about what remains of these iconic products.

Ivory is the spiritual successor to what’s largely considered the best Twitter client of all-time, Tweetbot. Outside of the actual content of the timeline, the app largely feels much like Tweetbot did with a handful of tweaks. It’s the most well-designed, thoughtful, and reliable social media client there is today. Much like Tweetbot was. As I’ve said before, I’m holding out hope that the Tapbots team eventually develops a counterpart for Bluesky. We’ll see what happens there, the developers have actually joined the platform in recent weeks leading a few to speculate that it’s in the cards now.

Twitterrific was another incredible Twitter client, in fact you could argue it was the first. While The Iconfactory doesn’t offer a Mastodon or Bluesky client, they do make Tapestry. Tapestry takes a different approach to social media by letting you build custom feeds with Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, RSS, YouTube, and others. Though the app only allows you to consume content, there’s no posting available at the moment. Tapestry feels like it has a lot of Twitterrific dna inside it, whether it’s the interesting font choices, the color scheme, the minimalistic timeline design, and even the shape of images and icons.

While we all miss Apollo deeply, it didn’t technically need to die. Though I understand why Christian Selig decided not to move forward with it after his contentious back and forth with Reddit. Despite Apollo’s demise, Narwhal was in fact redesigned and adopted a subscription model to accommodate the changes to API costs. I’ve been using Narwhal 2, the latest version, a lot lately and find it to be cleaner, more customizable, and in some cases more reliable than the first-party Reddit app. Reddit’s official app that’s built on the back of Alien Blue has a lot going on. It’s not bad, but it’s not the best experience. I’d argue Narwhal might just have it beat.

There are other clients for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Reddit. But none of them are as nice or reliable as the three apps mentioned above. They’re the real successors to the iconic clients we all miss dearly. So if you’re feeling nostalgic for Tweetbot, try Ivory. If you’re feeling nostalgic for Twitterrific, try Tapestry. And if you’re feeling nostalgic for Apollo, try Narwhal 2.

Feb 4, 2025 ∞

Bluesky Can Also Be Your New Instagram and TikTok, Not Just Twitter

If you’ve been looking to escape the big social media platforms, but still stay somewhat connected and entertained, I have the apps for you. It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Bluesky as a platform, though it would be nice to get some polished third-party replacement clients. That being said, the official Bluesky app is good enough for reading the feed, sending messages, and checking the news. But what if you’re looking to escape Instagram or TikTok? What if you want a photo-based social network or a place to mindlessly scroll vertically through videos? PinkSky and Bluescreen have you covered. Amazingly, Bluesky can now transform into not just a Twitter replacement, but an Instagram replacement and a TikTok replacement too with this pair of new apps. Just sign in with your Bluesky credentials and you’ve got a Bluesky client focused on photos with a very Instagram-like UI in PinkSky. Once you get logged in with Bluescreen, you’ll immediately realize that it should be a familiar experience to any TikTok fan. Just flick effortlessly through videos, search for them, or post your own. Keep in mind that in these apps, you’re technically seeing the same posts that you’d see in your Bluesky feed that have media attachments. They’re all visible in the main client, but text-only posts are not going to be visible in PinkSky or Bluescreen. I personally am still struggling to pick a platform to focus on, I’m currently using them all given how fragmented my network is. I still get very different experiences from each of the social apps, even ones with similar formats. But Bluesky’s flexibility and growth is increasingly compelling.

Feb 4, 2025 ∞

Tapestry is the Best Feed Reader Yet, and it Brings Twitterrific Nostalgia to Boot

Today the legendary development team at The Iconfactory finally released their long awaited feed reading app: Tapestry. I had regretted not contributing to the Kickstarter campaign, but man am I glad more than enough other folks did. Tapestry is a great app. It feels modern and new but has clear echoes of Twitterrific all throughout. Twitterrific was one of my all-time favorite apps. As someone obviously addicted to microblogging, my interest in these client apps stems way back to the earliest days of the App Store. Like I imagine many of you did too, I tried as many Twitter clients back in the day as possible. But Twitterrific consistently ranked in the top two right alongside Tweetbot. Between the two clients, Twitterrific was always more opinionated with unique font choices, themes, and interface layouts. The app was also generally ahead of the times too, in fact it was one of the earliest to adopt a “flat” user interface before iOS 7. It was a phenomenal app and I miss it a lot, which is why I am glad Tapestry exists. It’s obviously early days, the app is read-only for example. But it is customizable, colorful, and fast as all hell just like Twitterrific was. Even the default font and the shape of profile photos remind me of the options offered in Twitterrific.

Tapestry lets you read your Bluesky feed, Mastodon feed, RSS feeds, YouTube feeds, sub Reddits, and more. Sound a bit familiar? That’s probably because of the new Reeder by Silvio Rizzi. It is the successor to the iconic Reeder RSS app with boatloads of other feed options as well. I’ve used it on and off since it launched last year, but it has its shortcomings. Despite being beautifully designed, I’ve always found it to be slow to load new content and different pieces of that content weren’t differentiated enough. Tapestry solved all of my problems with the new Reeder. It loads quickly, it uses different colors to differentiate between source feeds on each post, and the density can be customized. It’s just a better app. It’s also free to use, a massive differentiator. The app serves some ads and isn’t as customizable without a subscription. But if you don’t want to pay (though I recommend it because the app is even better when you do) you can get all of the core functionality. If you do subscribe, it does happen to be twice as much as Reeder however. $1.99/month or $19.99/year compared to Reeder’s $1/month or $10/year. I think it’s worth it though. Never been a better or more important time to support indie developers.

Jan 29, 2025 ∞

Where are the Bluesky Clients?

Let’s be clear, Bluesky has handily defeated Mastodon to be the main alternative to the big microblogging networks. It may be smaller than Threads or X, but it’s still far larger than the platform named after the long extinct prehistoric creature. Mastodon currently has around 9 million users, while Bluesky has just broken 30 million. Recall that Mastodon has been around for almost a decade, while Bluesky really only launched about two years ago. ActivityPub, the framework that underlies Mastodon, does in fact seem to have a future. Sites and news platforms are starting to federate and Threads’ limited federation bodes well for at least some kind of interoperability. But Mastodon hasn’t taken off the way that Bluesky has.

Mastodon has lots of nerds, including me. So that’s not meant to be some sort of dig. The platform’s high concentration of nerds means lots of developers and lots of client apps. Mastodon clients have become the new UI playground in the same way that Twitter clients used to be. But what I can’t wrap my head around is the business decision of developers to lean into Mastodon clients versus Bluesky ones. Fortunately some progress seems to be starting to be made with apps like PinkSky that replicate the Instagram experience but using Bluesky as the backend. There are also a handful of clients like Skeets and GraySky, but nothing that approaches the quality of some Mastodon clients or the legendary Twitter clients of old. They’re okay, but they’re not worth dropping the official client. Other apps like OpenVibe and Reeder are designed to combine feeds from multiple services and they do work with Bluesky. But they’re not dedicated clients. I want Tweetbot or Twitterrific, but for Bluesky. I’m not seeing that yet. The opportunity is clearly there, it has tens of millions of users making it three times the size of Mastodon. In my experience, there’s also a wider array of interests and people on Bluesky. It’s far less homogenous and generally has a better, friendlier vibe. Heck, I would take Bluesky support in Tapbots’ Mastodon client Ivory even if they didn’t want to make a dedicated one.

I’m hopeful that someone is working on a high quality, beautifully designed, extremely stable Bluesky client for iOS and macOS. It would be crazy not to build one if you have an affinity for the platform as well as the skills and the time. I wish I could do it myself.