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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

> I feel for all the developers scrambling to make a mastodon app now in an effort to restart or secure their clients

Is anyone doing that? It would be incredibly foolish to believe that people that paid for a Twitter client would suddenly be fine with a paying for a Mastodon client.

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I think you would be surprised. The folks who will pay for a premium experience by using a 3rd party app are likely willing to do the same on another platform.

Might be a hard sell for me since less than 10% of the accounts that I follow on Twitter have any kind of Mastodon presence, and toot per tweet volume is probably considerably less than 10%.

I can get a lot more value from a good Twitter client than I can from a good Mastodon client.

On the other hand, I left twitter quite a while ago and I was a tweetbot user. I’ll be purchasing Ivory the day it’s available since I’m really waiting for a mastodon client that offers the tweetbot experience.

Purchasing or subscribing? Because I'd wager that Ivory will be on a yearly subscription basis like Tweetbot is now.

I’ll even subscribe. You can see how long I haven’t been on Twitter, I missed the move I subscription on tweetbot ;)

That is true for now, but in increase in mastodon usage is really mind blowing.

It is hard to believe such a big social network to migrate overnight, but it has happened before with digg moving to reddit.

I think you are missing where a large part of the value from those alternative clients come from beside features and layout: no ads or trash recommendations.

As far as I know, neither of those are an issue on Mastodon and therefore the value of 3rd party clients isn't there.

For me it’s about paying for a slightly smoother UX and for supporting the growth of the Mastodon ecosystem. I hope that good 3rd party apps will eventually also ease the onboarding of less techie audiences.

I hate subs, but I might make an exception here.

The Tweetbot people have one coming out any day now. Given the alarming speed at which the TestFlight slots go (I got in on my third attempt, totally by chance; all slots were gone by a minute after) there appears to be an audience.

Ivory from the makers of Tweetbot. The project was started before the whole Twitter API fiasco started, but apparently they've had to accelerate the development of it now.

More details: https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109683219720510229

Well it would make sense. If you have a bunch of customers who are clearly willing to pay for this kind of application, have a bit of brand loyalty and who may now have a bit of a sour taste in their mouth at being suddenly shut out of Twitter then that's definitely an opportunity worth exploring if you already have a team with expertise in building this kind of app (and quite possibly some tech that can be re-used)

The Mastodon account for Ivory, the Mastodon client from the developers of Tweetbot, has 32,000 followers already and it's still in closed alpha.

I, for one, am waiting for Ivory to come out of Beta to do just that.

yeah, most of them are doing it

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