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Seeing lots of comparisons to Mastodon, Threads, and XTwitter in this thread. I remember in the days of instant messaging, I had a single client (Adium for Mac

Seeing lots of comparisons to Mastodon, Threads, and XTwitter in this thread. I remember in the days of instant messaging, I had a single client (Adium for Mac OS X) which could talk to AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, etc. It gave me a unified buddy list, and a unified interface for messaging any of my friends, regardless of the underlying instant messaging provider. Is anyone working on a similar omniclient for Mastodon/Threads/Bluesky/XTwitter? If we get to the point where most users are using omniclients of this kind, that helps reduce network effects and lock-in. Seems like the Mastodon/Threads/Bluesky teams would have a strong incentive to collaborate on such a client, in order to reduce XTwitter network effects, essentially joining forces in their own unified network. (I imagine that XTwitter will block API access, at least in the short term.)

0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
Don't forget about https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ either. For Mastodon in particular, people are always talking about the difficulty of getting started. Is there a way to put a porcelain experience on that? Imagine I just enter my credit card info and I have my own instance without having to worry about any sysadmin details. You could monetize the client by charging a small premium above and beyond the baseline server costs. I want an experience so porcelain that in order to create a new account, I enter my username and it automatically checks its availability across dozens of social sites, then registers me in as seamless a manner as possible. Then when I click post, it by default broadcasts that post across all the accounts I registered. I suppose this is probably similar to the existing interface for a product such as Hootsuite, no? Maybe the best starting point is check if there's an open-source Hootsuite competitor, then optimize the interface for end users.
devinivy 3y ago
Not exactly what you're describing, but https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/ is a pretty neat project in this space.

0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago

Don't forget about https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ either. For Mastodon in particular, people are always talking about the difficulty of getting started. Is there a way to put a porcelain experience on that? Imagine I just enter my credit card info and I have my own instance without having to worry about any sysadmin details. You could monetize the client by charging a small premium above and beyond the baseline server costs. I want an experience so porcelain that in order to create a new account, I enter my username and it automatically checks its availability across dozens of social sites, then registers me in as seamless a manner as possible. Then when I click post, it by default broadcasts that post across all the accounts I registered. I suppose this is probably similar to the existing interface for a product such as Hootsuite, no? Maybe the best starting point is check if there's an open-source Hootsuite competitor, then optimize the interface for end users.

devinivy 3y ago

Not exactly what you're describing, but https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/ is a pretty neat project in this space.