Ivory is a superb new Mastodon consumer with a horrible identify

Chase a developer away out of your platform, they usually’ll go someplace else. However what occurs when the developer is without doubt one of the greatest on the market?

Earlier in January, Elon Musk’s Twitter blocked third-party purchasers on Twitter, together with widespread apps similar to Twitterific and Tweetbot. The corporate did this citing “long-standing” guidelines, although it added these guidelines after it had blocked these apps. Consequently, builders Iconfactory(Opens in a brand new window) and Tapbots(Opens in a brand new window) each discontinued their Twitter purchasers (Twitterific and Tweetbot, respectively) as there was merely no technique to get them to work once more.

In the meantime, Twitter competitor Mastodon has been amassing thousands and thousands of recent customers, a lot of them sad with the best way Musk has been operating issues at Twitter.

Now, Tapbots has launched Ivory(Opens in a brand new window), a brand new iPhone app that takes Tweetbot’s aesthetics and lots of of its options and applies it to Mastodon.

Tweet could have been deleted
(opens in a brand new tab)
(Opens in a brand new window)

(Aspect observe: Ivory is a nasty identify for an app that options an elephant mascot. That is a kind of names that we reckon can be modified inside per week.)

Naming snafu apart, Ivory is fairly nice. It is not an enormous departure from Mastodon’s iPhone consumer, however it does make the app much more…properly, Twitter-like. For instance, whenever you first signal on, you can change that principally empty Timeline into one thing that reveals both “Native” or “Federated” posts, which needs to be useful for folks transitioning from Twitter. The menu bar on the underside, with icons for House, Mentions, Profile, Notifications, and Search, may also really feel fairly acquainted.

There’s additionally an abundance of choices relating to font sort, dimension, spotlight colours, and different niceties which is able to make your expertise utilizing the app a bit extra nice.

One of many fundamental traits of Mastodon is that it would not depend on a single server; as a substitute, you need to create an account at a kind of servers referred to as situations (I’ve signed up on the pretty widespread techhub.social(Opens in a brand new window) occasion), with every occasion having barely totally different guidelines. This method has its good sides, however I wager it is also the rationale why extra folks have not switched to Mastodon but, as the method of choosing the proper occasion might be arduous. Ivory would not remedy this; you continue to should undergo roughly the identical steps, and signing up takes you away from Ivory’s app and into your browser. However as soon as you’ve got signed up, Ivory will make Mastodon a little bit simpler to make use of.

Ivory prices $1.99 monthly or $14.99 per yr, however you do get a seven-day free trial. Tapbots calls Ivory an “Early Entry” app because it plans so as to add extra options to the app and iron out any bugs. Hopefully they will begin with the app’s unlucky identify.