Elon Musk Gutted Their App. Now They Want To Make One That’s Billionaire-Proof: Tapestry will be RSS

“Twitterrific was our flagship app, and by far earned the most of any of our pieces of software we’ve produced. Its loss is still being felt revenue-wise to this day. We’re hopeful that Tapestry will help us regain some of that ground and help us keep our company healthy, doing the things we love to do — developing great, friendly and useful apps for iOS and macOS.”

The linked article though is quite interesting in what it reveals from all of this. When you consider both Twitter and Reddit did this to their users and 3rd party devs, there is a trend towards these more private centralised social networks to have restrictions in the way of 3rd party access. Whilst on the decentralised social networks the trend tends to be using an open protocol, and usually also supporting open RSS feeds.

So, Tapestry is tapping into this more open ecosystem: “This isn’t really a social media client directly in the mold of Twitterrific; instead, it’s a single place to view online stuff that matters, and it mostly uses open standards like ActivityPub and RSS. Luckily for them, they’ve already reached their $100,000 minimum funding goal.”

Its intention is not to replace any existing clients, although with all the decentralised social networks I’ve been involved with, their devs all openly encourage having different 3rd party client apps.

But it’s what is not directly stated in the linked article that concerns me the most, and I’ve heard others also echoing this sentiment, especially some journalists who have “jumped ship” from Twitter to Mastodon and other networks. The issue is around quality content creation, especially news. It’s not that there is no such news on the decentralised social networks, it’s that there are still too many mainstream news services, journalists, and governments stuck fast on Twitter, Reddit, etc. So many users are also just stuck in their bubble in the same places.

We do really need to see that final seismic shift across to embracing an open and decentralised social network ecosystem. Certainly, the Fediverse, built on the ActivityPub protocol, is not the only option out there, but it is an open standard endorsed social network and has gained a lot of content and user traction.

The way I understand Tapestry, is that it would not only help provide an integrated (single) view of the Fediverse (yes most existing ActivityPub apps can also do that), but it can also seamlessly include discovering and following content from Bluesky, and many others, including potentially even Nostr (via RSS feeds).

So, Tapestry may help provide some cohesion and single view that many users and content creators, who are still stuck on Twitter, Reddit, etc, seem to crave/demand. Many such users are actually caught up in indecision over “where must I pick to move to”. With something like Tapestry, that fear may disappear, and for creators such as news and governments they would be more easily “found and followed” through one single app like Tapestry.

Will it happen? I think so as the vast majority of users are often solely content consumers, and whilst it is true that to develop a high-quality app from the ground up takes cash, Iconfactory does have that experience and they have raised over US$100,000 to fund their app development.

Who knows, I’d expect this app to even go further, and start to support likes and comments for some of the networks it integrates with over time.

See https://digg.com/internet-culture/link/iconfactory-tapestry-mastodon-rss-interview-Twitterrific