Mastodon client from the people behind Tweetbot

The official client is alright. It makes some major Mastodon features (like the local timeline where people on your instance hang out) hard to access, which means I can’t recommend.

Paul Haddad said (https://tapbots.social/@paul/109684886363418765):

“Almost 24 hours later and still no official/unofficial info from inside Twitter. I'm going to continue as if this was all done on purpose.

What now? Ivory goes into hyper mode with just the absolute minimum 3-4 things that have to be done finished up and then off to Apple. Probably going to be a bunch of things I'm not super happy with but I guess we'll fix it in post.

Hopefully everyone knows what we're capable of and can live with some, hopefully not long lived, rough edges/missing features.”

In other words, they’re all in on Mastodon. I think that’s the right move. Twitter’s relationship with 3rd party client authors has been antagonistic at best for the last decade, so moving to a growing platform that’s rooted in open standards has to be hugely attractive.

Spring dev is creating Mona for Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@MonaApp

It is supposed to be available for iOS, iPadOS and macOS.

I see your point and identify with the frustration, but at the end of the day that's kind of the entire point of Mastodon and the main distinction that makes it stand out from Twitter. It's decentralized. There is no one server, and there can never be a complete and up to date list of all servers. Discord isn't a perfect comparison because even though they separate communities and sign-ups, it's still all hosted and operated by Discord.

The most frictionless way to join Mastodon is when a friend or group of friends invites you personally to theirs, or if you discover a community online that really jives with you and you want to join.

It's more like email or irc. You downloaded a client, but you need a server to make your account on. Servers can come and go. If twitter or discord brings down their service, discord servers stop existing and the client stops working. If a mastodon instance stops existing, you can use the same client and connect to a different one. It's my understanding that currently your account and data will be lost in that case.

It's not a Twitter replacement, it's a Twitter alternative. It's actually not necessary or desirable that every platform has to "win" and replace all other similar platforms, this is the thinking that gave us giant privacy-destroying monoliths in the first place. People that are satisfied with their Twitter experience should definitely stay there, Mastodon really won't work for them.

> the current list of Mastodon servers feels very limited

Try this site: https://instances.social/

It helped me find some instances that matched my interests. Just keep in mind, most instances will die out if they're not sufficiently funded either by donations or the pocket money of the owners. This is why I treat all my Mastodon accounts as potentially ephemeral accounts that will die out given enough time. The more popular instances seem to be in it for the long haul, so go with those (as much as you enjoy the smaller instances).

Sadly Mastodon doesn't want to be twitter and it's not actually something I'm personally interested in in it's current form. I'm still hoping t2.social turns into something big. Despite people wanting a twitter alternative, Mastodon is not it and will remain a niche toy for a subset of the tech crowd.

It's like email. When you create an email account, you also choose a provider like Gmail or Yahoo. With Mastodon, you choose a server. You can follow and be followed by anyone regardless of which server they're on. Just like you can email a Yahoo user from your Gmail email account.

There are two main criteria why you should prefer one Mastodon server over another:

1) You are looking for a niche community, and Mastodon offers a "local" feed of all the users on a server, so this is helpful to discover new accounts to follow in your niche interest

2) And / or you care about privacy, trust etc. and want an organization that hosts the server that you can trust.

But it's easy to switch from one server to another without losing followers or followees, so compared to email, much simpler. So, you can't really choose a "wrong server".

Now, I can understand why this can be confusing for people who are only used to centralized social media platforms. In the end, it's just something new for a lot of folks, but it's not a complicated or difficult concept to grasp.

Yes, one of the biggest problems of Mastodon is that taking a centralized social media and making it decentralized doesn't automatically work.

Twitter was specifically structured to be centralized, you can't just have people create a trillion twitters and federate them together.

If you, or other readers are still confused and want a geberal run-down if what's going on...

This is what i posted on another thread:

I found DeviantOllam's introduction on Mastodon/Fediverse[1] to be quite interesting and useful.

He covers contact discovery/migration from Twitter, and also mentions a fediverse contact search, although I forget what it was.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-jYZLs2j1Q

>Needless to say, if Mastodon is looking to replace Twitter (maybe they're not?), they need a better, more frictionless way to onboard new users.

Pretty sure Mastodon will never replace Twitter. It's just too different, can't attract users who want to know what's happening outside their social circle, and probably can't attract any brands either.

I was really hoping for "Tootbot".