Tweetbot Developer Tapbots Launches 'Ivory' App for Mastodon

[Sal09]

The main reason I bought / subscribed to Tweetbot was to avoid seeing ads. Mastodon’s native app have no ads etc so I guess I’ll be skipping parting ways with my £14.99.

Plus im not use to using Mastodon just yet.

 

[cgs1xx]

Bring back Ping 😉

 

[jadamTheWMD]

It's rapidly becoming the local news replacement for Twitter here in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Fellow Charlottesvillain here. Can you point me to some local sources in mastodon?

 

[Killbynumbers]

crazy, almost like developers need to make a living in order to continue iterating on the apps they make for one of the most popular phones on the market

I was using an older version of Tweetbot on my iPhone and Mac that had no sub. It worked perfectly. I will buy an app outright but I will not pay a subscription to use the app monthly.

 

[sjsharksfan12]

it went dark once the Dark Ages of MacBooks happened, if I recall. but uhh, then there’s this, my favorite thing to refer to from 20+ years ago:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.500/

It's kind of amazing going back to reading when something like the first Ipod just came out and one of the first posts is asking why it's so revolutionary. It's actually made me think about my biases when it comes to AR/VR and wondering why Apple isn't being revolutionary before. I think the attitude of "I'm sure someone will love it, but right now it's not for me" might be the way to go.

Yes the Ipod was a very revolutionary product. Little did they know at the time.

 

[Wildkraut]

What makes Ivory so much better than something like Ice Cubes? It’s another subscription vs free (or tip the guy if you’re nice). I’m thinking there’s a little hero worship going on here just because it’s tapbots. I tried both, and don’t see a lot of difference for the money.

Well, maybe it’s time for Tapbots to take the experience they gained developing Tweetbot, do something totally different and reinvent themselves. A subscription based social client for an open and free social platform won’t make a living for long, just like third-party Wikipedia Apps don’t.

 

[Smith288]

View attachment 2147588

I don’t think Elon has to worry.

Mastodon is a hugbox just like Truth Social or Parler. I’m aware of the “oh it’s federated and totally unique!” argument, but in practice it’s just for people to create their own little ideological ghettos where nothing that challenges them is allowed.

Bingo. Parler is dumb. Truth Social is garbage. Mastadon is following the same niche hole of soap box in their own courtyard.

 

[DocMultimedia]

As every other new social media platform - it will be popular the first 3 months then rapidly decline in use until people forget it existed.

Wish I was smart enough to know such things. I wouldn't have needed the social accounts I set up 15ish years ago and still use. I think the oldest one I still actively use is from 2002. Ugh. I'm "internet" old.

 

[Smith288]

Well, better be part of 1.8M users than of 165M users with most of them being scumbags and with one of them as their leader, heh. I hope Mastodon stays small.

I suppose if thats how you want to view the world. I would guess about 163 million of those accounts are just folks. And about a million are useless morons who make everything terrible. 1.8 million (of which I'd guess 1/4 of them are active now) is just an echo chamber. Might as well just get a mirror and a microphone connected to your headphones and say things you like to hear.

 

[TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️]

Bring back Ping 😉

The good old Ping. Steve Jobs was so excited about it. Love how he breaks it down in pieces.

 

[Smith288]

Wish I was smart enough to know such things. I wouldn't have needed the social accounts I set up 15ish years ago and still use. I think the oldest one I still actively use is from 2002. Ugh. I'm "internet" old.

My reddit is 15 yrs old. I think I signed up for it when it was competing with Digg. I'll have a cake day and people are like "bro... I was 4 when you joined reddit..."

 

[Vulkan]

$2 per month or $15 per year for what? The same thing I can do with the plethora of free clients available for Mastodon already that do that for free? I get devs need to get paid, but I dont do subscriptions for things like that.

 

[gank41]

As every other new social media platform - it will be popular the first 3 months then rapidly decline in use until people forget it existed.

As someone who’s been on there for about 5 years, I strongly disagree with you.

 

[rwilliams]

What makes Ivory so much better than something like Ice Cubes? It’s another subscription vs free (or tip the guy if you’re nice). I’m thinking there’s a little hero worship going on here just because it’s tapbots. I tried both, and don’t see a lot of difference for the money.

There is a little hero worship. I used Tweetbot from the beginning and it was my most used app by far over those 10+ years. So I’m happy to support them in this new venture.

 

[Wildkraut]

I suppose if thats how you want to view the world. I would guess about 163 million of those accounts are just folks. And about a million are useless morons who make everything terrible. 1.8 million (of which I'd guess 1/4 of them are active now) is just an echo chamber. Might as well just get a mirror and a microphone connected to your headphones and say things you like to hear.

I wouldn’t call Mastodon an echo chamber, that’s Twitter with its massive crap retweet’s and penetrant non-sense advertisements that didn’t even fit my interests. Now without third-party Twitter clients filtering most of the spam and ads, it’s even more one. I even had to disable notifications to avoid shady private messages requests of light dressed busty fake girls causing alerts on my iPhone.

Plenty of scientists and developers went Mastodon already. You can find interesting stuff there, but yes it’s nothing for the usual crap like “Hey guys, look my curly hair! ❤️💋🥰😍 Love you all 😘” self adulation celebrity throw ups, yet.

I hope Mastodon stays small!

 

[Sasparilla]

Nice to hear they did this, as tweetbot was a great client - some good planning on their part to have started this soon after the debt laden buyout of Twitter happened. They must have guessed Musk was going to stab all the 3rd party clients in the back at some point since Twitter's API didn't provide advertising and Musk seemed very focused on it (before scaring off a bunch of advertisers).

Hopefully they can make a go of it.

 

[seanmcbay]

I hate Elon as much as any other sane person but no way I’m moving to Mastodon. I just don’t see it having legs.

 

[Abazigal]

who uses mastodon?

I do, mainly because the tech bloggers that I used to follow on Twitter have largely migrated over to Mastodon. Tweetbot getting blocked was the final straw, because I absolutely refuse to use the website or the stock app in its current form.

I have also downloaded Ivory and subscribed to the highest tier. I have always been of the opinion that Tweetbot was underpriced for what it offered, and I suppose this is my way of giving back to the devs a little more.

 

[eveluvsrainbows]

I got banned from Mastodon for posting my very first post, which makes no sense. There is no free speech there. Good luck, developers.

there is free speech there, and as you didn't specify what you posted, you could've posted something really bad. not to mention mastodon is a federated network, you were only banned from one instance.

 

[TracesOfArsenic]

Tweetbot has been a subscription service, too. It’s one of the apps I have paid for. The other subscription services I pay for is Dropbox. It will get out of hand if you will have many subscription services, but otherwise 20 bucks a year is do-able.

I was against the sub model for Tweetbot but I paid anyway because it was a good app. I can't say I'm happy with the 'development' of Tweetbot that was used to justify the ongoing cost though. Bugs and lots of opportunity to build more nice UX but the promise was never delivered on.

 

[jozero]

Mastodon feels like the glory days of the 90s and nntp newsgroups - I am finding it fantastic. And having a hyper polished TapBot app to view the stream is just the cherry on the top

It's based on the W3C ActivityPub spec, open for all - just like every major service on the internet / web should be. Its exciting times again

 

[MacBH928]

Mastodon's Achilles heel is that you are at the mercy of your instance master. They literally have the ability to make you see or not see what they want. If that is not "1984" stuff, I do not know what is.

 

[Wildkraut]

Mastodon feels like the glory days of the 90s and nntp newsgroups - I am finding it fantastic. And having a hyper polished TapBot app to view the stream is just the cherry on the top

It's based on the W3C ActivityPub spec, open for all - just like every major service on the internet / web should be. Its exciting times again

I still use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) it’s also from the good ol’ days.

 

[wanha]

I got banned from Mastodon for posting my very first post, which makes no sense. There is no free speech there. Good luck, developers.

What was the content of your post?

 

[techpr]

165M users vs 1.8M users. /side eye

Actually is 9.26M accounts as we speak. Growing every day!! WAYYY Better than Twitter!