No, you didn’t miss a “Phase One” post. In fact, you’re living in it right now. People who have or are in the process of leaving Twitter are either abandoning social media entirely or are deciding on which up-and-coming platform they wish to settle into. Bluesky is the most like Twitter, so for those who want the familiar feeling without too much headache it’s a good choice. The Fediverse (specifically Mastodon) is a diverse and de-corporatized solution with ties to other apps like Pixelfed (Instagram) and Lemmy (Reddit). While both platforms have their supporters and detractors, the fact is that Phase One is the mad grab for Twitter’s crown and people are landing where they feel the most comfortable and where they feel they can get the best bang for their buck. The downside is that everyone you could once reach through Twitter is now spread across several non-connected platforms, forcing Those Who Care to sign up for multiple accounts and to check multiple apps or websites every day just to make sure the people they care about are OK.

The other day, the Fan-Favorite Belghast ribbed a few non-Mastodon folks with this (truthful) banger:

Post by @belghast@gamepad.club
View on Mastodon

The context isn’t super valid in the service of this post (but the post on it’s own…super valid), but I responded based on the first sentence:

Post by @scopique@gamepad.club
View on Mastodon

To which Bel replied (I promise I’m not trying to rebuild Mastodon here):

Post by @belghast@gamepad.club
View on Mastodon

And that leads us to Phase Two: The Social Media Aggregators.

One App To Rule Th…You Get The Idea

There are a lot of annoying (and dangerous) things about the way the tech sector operates, but one that is ever-present is the boneheaded and irresponsible manner in which every tech company fucks off on their own path through a newly opened wilderness. Some succeed — iPhone and Android, for example — and some die by the wayside — like Windows Phone. Rather than work together to come up with some shared base of interoperability, tech companies race to be the one who becomes the mind-share winner and the platform that the most third party developers support by default. Technology is not about “what’s good for the consumer”, and is all about “which corporation can sucker the most users into their walled garden”.

Foregoing interoperability in a bid to dominate the marketplace goes back further than just cellphones, though. When I was younger — and I know this pertains to you as well, friend — I fielded several concurrent “instant messenger” platforms like ICQ, AIM, and MSN Messenger. As technology progressed, I found myself maintaining multiple voice apps such as TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble. “Splitting the party”, so to speak, is not a new phenomenon, and it’s become such a recognized state of being that there are always developers who hang back to “clean up” after the reckless abandon that larger players leave in their wake. These developers capitalize on the fact that platforms don’t intercommunicate, and attempt to fill that gap with apps of their own that can bridge these deficiencies.

I think my first experience with this was Trillian, an app which tried to unify ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, and possibly others that I cannot remember. This was quite the godsend as it only required the installation of one app and every conversation could be accessed in one place. Now, with the social media breakup ongoing, there’s a few apps which are looking to bridge the gap between those who are embracing federation — Bluesky and Mastodon — while throwing a bone to a few others who I fully expect to get dropped from consideration in the future.

Note: I didn’t do research prior to starting this post so I didn’t realize my examples below are mostly iOS only. I don’t have an Android app so if you know of similar apps for Android, please drop them in the comments. Sorry about that.

Reeder (iOS)

Apparently Reeder goes back 15 years according to their website, but have recently been pushed to the fore by integrating access to BSky, Masto, Pixelfed (Federated Instagram), YouTube, Podcasts, Reddit, and others alongside their original mandate of RSS feeds. You can see all of your accounts on the sidebar and peep into each one individually.

Tapestry (iOS)

This one was just released this week — possibly just today. IconFactory is a well-known app developer who made the Twitter app I used to use, Twitterrific. Like Reeder, Tapestry allows for aggregation of BSky, Masto, RSS, YouTube, Reddit, and others (including the, uh, USGS Earthquake notification system?). IconFactory’s apps are always a pleasure to look at and usually ship with the vast majority of features in place on day one.

OpenVibe (iOS/Android)

Ah! Found one for you Android users. OpenVibe is probably the best app we have currently for bridging the gap between different social media platforms, although it only supports BSky, Masto, Nostr, and Threads, with RSS support “coming soon”.

Too Little, Too Soon

Aside from OpenVibe, the race now seems to be towards an app which will allow you to consume your feeds. Both Reeder (as the name states plainly) and Tapestry (as the name infers) only allow you to view posts from accounts you add. Granted, you can view them all in one place and, in the case of Tapestry, can view them in one continuous fire-hose of a homepage, but the most interactivity you can expect to have is to share or maybe do whatever each platform uses for it’s “like” button. OpenVibe is the only app which allows you to post to platforms.

Is this what the People want, though? Flipboard is an app that’s been around for quite some time, and has found a niche in the curated news post aggregation field, and they are also working on their own means of aggregating posts from across different platforms if I remember correctly. Talking about RSS and news aggregators, Flipboard has set the precedence for what a “consumption app” can do and how it can look, and I feel that the makers of Reeder and Tapestry and possibly others are cleaving closely to that approach rather than take the Trillium approach that OpenVibe is chasing. I don’t quite get the logic behind turning a “social” media platform into a “face-pressed-against-the-window-looking-into-the-party” platform by only allowing users to passively scroll through their timelines without the ability to participate; that to me seems like the antithesis of what a “social” media platform is all about.

Add to this the fact that Reeder offers Reeder+ for $10 a year, which allows you to add your platform’s “Home” feed, to share feeds with others, and allows more than 10 feeds to be added in total (this includes RSS, YouTube, etc). Reeder is created by a solo developer, and $10 a year is not onerous, but I can already use individual and free apps to do what Reeder does with a degraded experience.

Tapestry, on the other hand, is on some serious meth. The free app has ads. You can pay a subscription or a one time fee to enable custom timelines, “muffle” and mute accounts, words, and phrases, and customize the look of the app. Here’s the punchline: it’s $1.99/month, $19.99/year, and a blistering $79.99 one time purchase. JFC, all that for the ability to just window-shop your own social media feeds. I guess you end up paying for the privilege of being stopped from making bad posting decisions, but come on!

I don’t think we’re at a point where aggregator apps are worth the electrons they’re written in. Maybe we’re not quite in Phase Two; maybe we’re in Phase One-Point-Five, where third party apps are trying to see which features users gravitate towards, which ones they reject, and which ones they request most often. As of right now, though, viewing feeds seems to be the lowest bar to reach. I commend these developers for including RSS, though, as I feel that blogging is entering into a renaissance period. I would rather these fancy aggregators add the ability to contribute to the conversations, though, as a social media platform that’s view-only is attempting to drive users towards the idea that only other people’s opinions are valuable, and conversation is worthless.

And IconFactory needs to put down the crackpipe. No mobile app is worth $80 fucking dollars.

Scopique

Husband, father, gamer, developer, and curator of 10,000 unfinished projects.