Tweetbot creator Tapbots this week released Ivory for Mac following months of beta testing, bringing its well-designed Mastodon app to the desktop. Mastodon is a social network that gained popularity following Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter last year. A new "Universal" subscription tier allows users to access Ivory across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad for $24.99 per year, or users can subscribe to the Mac app on its own for $14.99 per year. A free seven-day trial is available and provides access to all features, and the app can be used in read-only mode without a subscription at any time.

Ivory has a similar design as Tweetbot, a third-party Twitter app that Tapbots was forced to abandon after Musk cut off their access to the platform. Tapbots promises to add new features to Ivory as development continues, but the app already provides one of the best experiences for using Mastodon on the Mac. MacStories editor John Voorhees published a review of Ivory for Mac yesterday for a closer look at the app.

Ivory can be downloaded from the Mac App Store. The app requires a Mac running macOS Ventura or later, according to the listing.

Article Link: Tweetbot Creators Launch Ivory for Mac: Well-Designed Mastodon App

Anybody notice how a mastodon is the predecessor to the elephant?

Just wondering.

Hopefully Mastodon will grow in popularity but I’m not sure if 1.2 million active users counts as particularly popular compared to other sites.

Looks cool but I miss Tweetbot. There's something about Mastodon App. I don't think it's there yet as far as popularity goes.

neuropsychguy said:

Hopefully Mastodon will grow in popularity but I’m not sure if 1.2 million active users counts as particularly popular compared to other sites.

The whole point of an app like twitter is everyone of note is on it. Tweetbot was one of the best apps ever though. RIP. Mastodon has the same crappy social media censorship model of other apps with hall monitors waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, so it's dead in the water to me. Mastodon is a poor man’s twitter with less users for folks with a thin skin or those who wish to live life in an echo chamber.

Update: yes I’m aware how it works with different instances, but already that creates problems and is annoying. Better twitter alternatives to Mastodon exist already: Reddit and Discord. Twitter is much better than all three for getting broad information and divergent opinions. Reddit is ok for having certain focused questions answered, but beyond that I find it has some serious vampire energy going on. It may help if Reddit just got rid of downvotes altogether. It might rectify some of the groupthink on there. With Discord I’m not in love with how it works at all. Twitter also has many features for muting certain words, topics and conversations (which I use to make my experience more pleasant and a bit less political) and not too many ads. Curating your own experience is infinitely better than someone else censoring for your experience.

And unlike YouTube, for example, when you block an account on twitter it stays blocked even in search. YouTube make it impossible to block the most annoying accounts and I’ve sent them feedback many times on this for years but they obviously don’t care about their users because they don’t listen. Blocked should mean 100% blocked, always. No excuses. Twitter definitely isn’t perfect but phones are mostly toxic anyway.

I just the free one through the browser. I am not that heavy on posting to social media to warrant purchasing any third party social media client.

TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️ said:

Looks cool but I miss Tweetbot. There's something about Mastodon App. I don't think it's there yet as far as popularity goes.

High chance it will suffer the same problems as competitors to Facebook for example. It’s bad but everyone is already on it so nobody is going to switch platform.

Mac Fly (film) said:

Mastodon has the same crappy social media censorship model of other apps with hall monitors waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, so it's dead in the water to me.

Not really? Mastodon itself has no censorship policy, but because it's fully decentralized each server or instance using Mastodon's service sets its own rules. Some are more strict than others.

That said, I generally agree with the sentiment. Twitter "worked" as a platform for conversation because virality and discoverability is built into its genes. Mastodon is the exact opposite. It's HARD to find people unless you actually know them, and that's just not a great way to connect with new people.

But that's okay. Not everything needs to be a Twitter clone, and Mastodon doesn't WANT to be a Twitter clone, so maybe people should stop acting like it is?

Mac Fly (film) said:

The whole point of an app like twitter is everyone of note is on it, within reason. Tweetbot was one of the best apps ever though. RIP. Mastodon has the same crappy social media censorship model of other apps with hall monitors waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, so it's dead in the water to me.

Isn't that every social media though? I don't think there is a "free for all" platform out there.

I don't use Twitter or Mastodon, so I'm not sure. I use Discord, which obviously has the server model, so different servers have different rules, and some are stricter than others.

Mac Fly (film) said:

The whole point of an app like twitter is everyone of note is on it, within reason. Tweetbot was one of the best apps ever though. RIP. Mastodon has the same crappy social media censorship model of other apps with hall monitors waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, so it's dead in the water to me.

Isn't the point that different servers have different censorship rules? So you can have one that suits you, you just might not be able to interact with people who prefer the censorship (just as you wouldn't if they were on an entirely different platform, so no loss in that regard).

neuropsychguy said:

Hopefully Mastodon will grow in popularity but I’m not sure if 1.2 million active users counts as particularly popular compared to other sites.

Mastodon is a broken Twitter with Reddit-tier mods. It's always going to be niche for that.

Some people want that, which is fine. They just need to be realistic about the reach.

Mac Fly (film) said:

The whole point of an app like twitter is everyone of note is on it, within reason. Tweetbot was one of the best apps ever though. RIP. Mastodon has the same crappy social media censorship model of other apps with hall monitors waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, so it's dead in the water to me.

mastadon does not have any censorship model. Its like a minecraft server anyone can instantiate their own and declare their own moderation rules.

You can set one up just for yourself, and post your thoughts and then censor yourself.

In keeping this focus on the app itself, as opposed to anyone's experiences on the service that this app provides---

Ivory is Great! I've tried Mona, too, and that's also a pretty great app. But I just like Ivory better. I've even tried a bunch of themes for Mona, but still keep coming back to Ivory. And I'm speaking as someone who's been on Mastodon for roughly 5 years now.

Ivory has been a delight so far. Only thing that annoys me is that there's not an easy way (at least I haven't found it) to get to your private messages.

gank41 said:

In keeping this focus on the app itself, as opposed to anyone's experiences on the service that this app provides---

Seriously! "I refuse to even try this service!" Ok, thanks for sharing?

dugbug said:

mastadon does not have any censorship model. Its like a minecraft server anyone can instantiate their own and declare their own moderation rules.

You can set one up just for yourself, and post your thoughts and then censor yourself.

Yeah! I set one up for our band

It's OK but it's lacking quite a lot of features that their Twitter app had. I really curse the fact that Twitter killed the api for third party software. I had so many filters set up that Twitter was actually usable.

MisterSavage said:

Ivory has been a delight so far. Only thing that annoys me is that there's not an easy way (at least I haven't found it) to get to your private messages.

That's more of a "Mastodon Thing" the TapBots folks have acknowledged. Their roadmap looks pretty impressive, and knowing that it's easier for them to work with the other server admins, things will most likely progress much quicker and smoothly than they ever could have with Tweetbot.

Looks great. I still like the polish of Ivory and subscribed for a year. Although I am not a subscription fan. Since the Mac version requires a separate subscription I decided not to renew and swapped over to Mona. That’s a great option with no subscriptions.

Mona is a lot better on the iPad than Ivory is as well. Hopefully they fold back some of the Mac elements to the iPad version.

I will keep an eye on where they go with Ivory though.

gank41 said:

That's more of a "Mastodon Thing" the TapBots folks have acknowledged. Their roadmap looks pretty impressive, and knowing that it's easier for them to work with the other server admins, things will most likely progress much quicker and smoothly than they ever could have with Tweetbot.

But other apps have implemented it. I can launch Ice Cubes and there's a button for access to my private messages.

Otherwise I have been really happy with Ivory.

As a plea to developers, please offer a one-time purchase tier in addition to a subscription, like the Apollo app does. This app looks great and if I used Mastodon more it'd be an easy sell to me as a one-time purchase.

MisterSavage said:

But other apps have implemented it. I can launch Ice Cubes and there's a button for access to my private messages.

Otherwise I have been really happy with Ivory.

Yes, and I specially remember reading Paul from TapBots pointing out how there's actually nothing different in how Mastodon's specifically handling the DM's, it's just that Ice Cubes makes it LOOK like they're in a different spot. Most other clients keep the DM's in line and maybe highlight them (or in Mona's case, you can make them look however you want). Ultimately, the DM's are always still in line in your Feed, it's just that one app client is choosing to make it look like they're not while the other clients show them accurately.

Why use this instead of Slack or Discord? I don’t understand the target. Who needs an isolated distributed platform for “tweets”.

Also a lot of the excitement for this (even on this site) was when Twitter rolled back its censorship to 2015 levels and once the world didn’t end the question becomes - who cares?

I don't use Mastodon but I just noticed this app doesn't collect any personal data, which is... impressive, to say the least: Compare this with Twitter 😬: