The much-awaited “Ivory” client from Tapbots has now made its App Store debut as Mastodon continues to gain popularity. Long-time Tweetbot users will be acquainted with Ivory, but it has many unique features and improvements to the Mastodon experience.
To look at Ivory’s offerings thus far and what’s to come, continue reading below. And right now, get it from the App Store.
Ivory will urge you to connect easily to your Mastodon account when you first download it. To verify your identity, you must log into your Mastodon server before using your personal Mastodon account.
Long-time Tweetbot users will be acquainted with Ivory’s style. Your Home feed and mentions are easily accessible from the bottom navigation bar. All your alerts, searches, lists, favorites, bookmarks, overall activity data, filters, or a fast link to your Mastodon profile may be shown in the next three spots, which are also fully configurable.
From the primary Home feed view, you’ll see a familiar timeline of all the postings from the Mastodon accounts you follow. Using the fast action buttons located under each post or swiping left or right on the post, you may instantly engage with those posts straight from the Home feed. Swiping right will take you to the post’s “Detail” view, allowing you to like or reply to a post quickly.
Using the trumpet symbol in the bottom-right area, you may rapidly write your Mastodon post. You may also search the timeline by pressing the search symbol in the top-right corner.
You may go to your “Local” timeline, which displays all postings from accounts on your Mastodon instance from the top of the Home feed. For example, the “Local” timeline on the Mastodon. Social instance will display all postings made by other users on that instance.
Alternatively, you may choose the “Federated” timeframe. A more extensive stream of postings from your instance, people you follow, people you follow promote, and more are shown on your timeline. The Federated timeline may be implemented differently by app and instance, but you should anticipate it to have more posts and accounts than the “Federated” or Home feeds.
Ivory’s “Settings” interface offers a few customization options and the possibility to add more Mastodon accounts.
The customization choices include the ability to change the font style, text size, and several other interface elements. For instance, you may reduce or even eliminate the size of the action above buttons. Additionally, you may alter the sizes of the media thumbnail previews and the accent colors.
Swiping on posts in the timeline, moving posts about, modifying the tabs at the bottom, and other actions are all customizable. Managing Mastodon’s “Sensitive Content” settings, for example, is an option that is exclusive to that platform.
Ivory is a very amazing first release of Tapbots’ Mastodon client. Again, there are clear parallels to Tweetbot, but with modifications and additions made to use what Mastodon has to offer fully. You can vote in Mastodon polls since the platform grants access to polls to outside developers (something that the Twitter API never offered for third-party developers).
Ivory works flawlessly on all of your different devices. Thanks to timeline syncing, your timeline position is linked across Ivory on your iPhone and iPad. This also holds for any personalized filters you could have developed.
It’s crucial to remember that this is Ivory’s first release. In light of Elon Musk’s shameful decision to block third-party Twitter programs like Tweetbot, Tapbots has accelerated its plans to release Ivory publicly.
I’m especially curious to see what the publication of Ivory implies for Mastodon’s future expansion. Ivory’s release has prompted several Mastodon sceptics to change their minds about the social network; the similarities between Ivory and Tapbots make the transition less difficult and abrupt.
You can now get Ivory for Mastodon from the App Store. To test out the app, you may download it for free and use the fully working sample; to enjoy the full Ivory experience, you can subscribe for $1.99 per month or $14.99 per year. The Basic tier has the same benefits as the “Premier Subscriber” tier, which was created to support Tapbots more.
On its website, Tapbots provides a clear roadmap of its capabilities to add to Ivory over the next months. The business is also preparing Ivory for Mac. However, it is currently in the very early stages of development.
- Edit profile, highlighting metadata included.
- Change Posts
- Make posts with content warnings.
- Read the media’s alt- or description text.
- enhanced hashtags (search, following)
- Custom instance emoji support
- tab with improved notifications (options and better filtering)
- enhanced navigation bar
- Reduce duplicate boosted posts
Ivory’s debut is a wonderful opportunity to sign up for Mastodon, particularly if you used Tweetbot before it was shut down.