With Twitter/X’s latest idiotic move, a large wave of the remaining artists that I followed over there have created Bluesky accounts and are in the process of moving (and I think it’s going to stick this time).
For the last few months, I’ve been using Reeder as read-only timeline of Mastodon and Bluesky. Its timeline position syncing has been flawless across macOS and iOS and I give the developer all the credit in the world for a really fantastic application.
Unfortunately, the limitations of being read-only are separating at the seams. It now means I want a real multi-network social client.
Reeder has been great as a read-only timeline, but wanting to give likes or reply has a lot of friction baked in (additionally as of now, rendering of timeline posts is problematic when there are multiple images… you only see the first and no indication there are more if you click into it). This makes sense given what Reeder set out to do as a general purpose timeline app, but the limitations are showing.
My needs:
- Multi-network (Mastodon & Bluesky)
- Sync timeline position across multiple client instances
- Support for macOS and iOS
In an ideal world, one of the established Mastodon clients could support Bluesky (Ivory would be ideal, but I’d take any app that supported the features I needed). As soon as you become multi-network, you can’t use the sync position that the social network provides. I think this will be a dealbreaker for many apps because it means running some sort of sync service (or trying to use iCloud’s key-value store, which doesn’t have the greatest reputation).
I already have a backlog of project ideas I’d love to work on, but taking inspiration from Phanpy, I’d love to try my hand at a web client with a sync backend.
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