Ivory is a great new Mastodon client with a horrible name

Kick a developer off your platform and they will go elsewhere. But what happens when the developer is one of the best out there?

In early January, Elon Musk’s Twitter blocked third-party clients on Twitter, including popular apps like Twitterific and Tweetbot. The company did so citing “longstanding” rules, although it added those rules after blocking those apps. As a result, the developers Iffactory(Opens in a new window) and Tapbots(Opens in a new window) both shut down their Twitter clients (Twitterific and Tweetbot respectively) as there was simply no way to get them working again.

Meanwhile, Twitter competitor Mastodon has amassed millions of new users, many of whom are unhappy with the way Musk has run things on Twitter.

Now Tapbots has launched Ivory(Opens in a new window)a new iPhone app that takes Tweetbot’s aesthetic and many of its features and applies it to Mastodon.

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(Side note: Ivory is a bad name for an app that features an elephant mascot. This is one of the names we expect to see changed within a week.)

Snafu aside, Ivory is pretty awesome. It’s not a huge departure from Mastodon’s iPhone client, but it does make the app a lot more… well, Twitter-like. For example, when you first log in, you can change that mostly blank timeline to something that shows either “local” or “connected” posts, which should be helpful for people switching from Twitter. The menu bar at the bottom with Home, Mentions, Profile, Notifications, and Search icons will also feel fairly familiar.

There’s also a plethora of options in terms of font, size, highlight colors, and other niceties that will make your experience with the app a little more enjoyable.

One of Mastodon’s fundamental characteristics is that it doesn’t rely on a single server; Instead, you need to create an account on one of those servers called instances (I signed up on the fairly popular techhub.social(Opens in a new window) instance), each instance having slightly different rules. This approach has its good points, but I bet it’s also why more people haven’t switched to Mastodon yet, as the process of choosing the right instance can be tedious. Ivory doesn’t solve that; You still need to go through roughly the same steps, and signing up takes you away from the Ivory app and into your browser. But once you’re signed up, Ivory will make using Mastodon a little easier.

Ivory costs $1.99 a month or $14.99 a year, but you get a seven-day free trial. Tapbots calls Ivory an “Early Access” app as they plan to add more features and fix bugs to the app. Hopefully they’ll start with the app’s unfortunate name.