I had a corpse on my phone, and I kept checking in on it. Ever since January 12th, my preferred iOS Twitter app had been locked in stasis, frozen on an error modal informing me that âthere was a problem authenticating with Twitter,â and wow, was there ever. Without any notice, Twitter had revoked the mainline access credentials for Tweetbot and every other third-party client not operated by Twitter itself.Â
Unlike many decisions made during Twitterâs âvox populiâ Roman cosplay era, there had never been a poll about this. Elon Musk had never appeared deep in a thread with Kevin Sorbo and a spartan avatar burner account to say, âYikes, third-party apps should go.â Instead, Twitter took several days to communicate with its users or commercial partners and admit that the move was deliberate, eventually releasing a âyour faultâ-style official tweet gnomically explaining that âTwitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules.âÂ
All the while, I kept reopening this dead app on my phone, surfing on pure muscle memory
All the while, I kept reopening this dead app on my phone, surfing on pure muscle memory to the same error pop-up over the last post my timeline saw: a frozen Lord of the Rings GIF of King ThĂ©oden sneering, âYou have no power here.â This app had been one of my primary ways of accessing Twitter for over a decade, so I was used to it making me feel powerless. But this repetitive ghost-swiping felt like a new low.Â
âYouâre definitely not alone,â Paul Haddad reassured me, and I believed him because he co-created Tweetbot. âI know a lot of people whoâve had to delete it just to stop that from happening.âÂ
This rictus state of pure interface had no other real exit. Yes, if I poked around a little, I could juke Tweetbotâs error protocols just enough to scroll through whatever slice of timeline it had loaded into memory right before the end. But the only reward there was getting to use Tweetbotâs well-honed tweet reading experience to endlessly review posts from January 12th. The pleasant haptic jolt I got from favoriting a mutualâs January 12th announcement that theyâre âbuilt like a wormâ was a lie; it never registered. Without any ability to reauthenticate with Twitter, Tweetbotâs interface was all it had left.
This whole context, from Tweetbotâs error message to its short-term memory of cached content, was designed to be ephemeral, just something youâd see when your signal cut out or if Twitter itself went down.Â
âCertainly we had to deal with outages in the past, the whole Fail Whale era,â Haddad said. âWe definitely didnât think this is how it would end.âÂ
Nobody does a product design sprint on how their app should behave in the event that it unexpectedly no longer exists.
Nobody does a product design sprint on how their app should behave in the event that it unexpectedly no longer exists
Haddadâs three-person company, Tapbots, handled all of this as gracefully as one could expect anyone to handle a straightforward attack on their livelihood. Ten or so days after the app had its plug pulled, the team issued a stout elegy for their creation, without flinching from saying that theyâd âinvested over 10 years building Tweetbot for Twitter and it was shut down in a blink of an eye.â Tapbotsâ tribute joined sentiments from its heartbroken superusers, whoâd happily paid a few bucks per year for access to its artisanal iconography and expertly rounded corners. (âOne of the very best apps Iâve ever used,â eulogized Apple ultra-blogger John Gruber.) Like many other Twitter members disappointed by the companyâs mercurial policymaking and ego-driven roadmap, Tapbots surveyed the wreckage and chose to migrate. With a grim but dignified paragraph break, Tapbots announced a new focus for the company: Ivory, a fledgling Mastodon client built on all it had learned from creating Tweetbot as well as much of its code.
As a longtime Mastodon account holder who nonetheless still feels like a rookie on the platform, Iâm happy to see Tapbots taking its talents to the Fediverseâs loosely joined scatterplot of social islands. The experience of joining Mastodon really depends on which server you start out on â the particular people you associate with Twitter have already dispersed, if theyâre here yet at all. A tool like Fedifinder or Debirdify will yield a tidy data payload you can use to bulk-follow individuals where theyâve landed, but they might also be spread across two dozen servers. Part of Twitterâs double helix of horror and intrigue was that everyone swam in the same pool â you and your weird pals and Russian disinfo forces and Shaq. On Mastodon, every server has its own culture, and you can only join one server per account, so thereâs a bit of a sense that everyoneâs playing to a slightly different room. Installing Ivory for the first time, I felt some hope that a little familiarity might go a long way.
Having now used Ivory for several months, I can say that, while Mastodon isnât much like Twitter, Ivory at least feels like Tweetbot, and thatâs been enough to give the whole experience a comforting gloss that has, in turn, helped me embrace Mastodon. I asked Haddad if this was intentional. âThatâs been one of our goals,â he told me, âto make it as easy and transparent as possible. Obviously Twitter and Mastodon are two different things, but to be honest, I like Twitter.â He paused to correct himself. âWell, I liked Twitter.âÂ
âObviously Twitter and Mastodon are two different things, but to be honest, I like Twitter… Well, I liked Twitter.â
This wasnât just a comment on regime change. Haddad keyed in on how Twitter used to feel, especially in its earlier pre-algorithmic feed days. âA simple social network where people post and reply to each other. I didnât think there was anything wrong with it back then, I donât think thereâs anything wrong with it now, and if we can provide that experience, Iâm more than happy to do it,â he said. Focusing on a classic Twitter flavor does require some sacrifices at this early stage. Ivory doesnât let you muck too much with Mastodonâs decentralized nuances, for example; you canât use it to explore servers you havenât joined or browse the social graphs of interesting people in other communities. The most prominent view Ivory offers is a simple timeline from the accounts youâve specifically followed. You can also browse the Local server you joined or branch out to a broader and more chaotic Federated feed, all with the same smooth-scrolling action as Tweetbot because (as Haddad confirmed) itâs literally the same scroll-handling function. Ivory, at least in this infant form, gets you comfortable by reducing Mastodonâs multidimensional possibility space into simple 2D feeds that fit a well-established frame.Â
Tapbots makes what I would call âopinionated software,â which is a tricky phrase to throw around because it can be complimentary or backhanded depending on context. But the idea is that simply dumping every possible function of a Twitter or Mastodon at a userâs feet like a bin of Legos isnât actually helping them use it successfully. âOne thing I donât like to do, and itâs hard to get away from it, is have a million settings in the app,â said Haddad, confidently accepting my opinionated software label. âWe try very hard to keep the number of settings down to minimize it to only the things that are really important, and then just make things work as automatically as possible.âÂ
This kind of taste-driven dance leading can help bring the ideal form of a platform into focus as it evolves
Tweetbot came to prominence by having opinions about the best way to respond to tweets (with a friendly but deliberate swipe) or to boost them (tapping once to expose likes and retweets, again subtly nudging you to reconsider). These learned behaviors arenât necessarily obvious at first, even if they eventually become second nature enough to introduce the kind of compulsion that inspired this piece â and Tweetbotâs orientation toward multitouch virtuosos probably left some growth on the table. Tapbots also made some firm edits to the Twitter experience. You had to swipe into a tweet to see its stats, for example, exactly the kind of decision youâd never see in an official Twitter app optimized for an endless flywheel of engagement. Deployed skillfully, this kind of taste-driven dance leading can help bring the ideal form of a platform into focus as it evolves, and the still-burbling primordial soup of Mastodon stands to benefit.Â
When I talked to Haddad, I didnât feel like I was talking to someone still in the throes of grief. He and Tapbots have accepted the casual destruction of a decadeâs work and salvaged the best parts into a new chapter for the company. Â
âNow that weâre out, itâs kind of interesting just to not have to worry about Twitter stuff anymore,â Haddad said. âIâm just chilling out and seeing what the latest nonsense is.âÂ
I asked Haddad if he still had Tweetbot on his phone, and if so, which tweet it had frozen on after the extinction event.Â
âLet me see,â he said, swiping a bit, frowning at his screen. âMaybe I did delete it,â he ventured gently. He swiped some more. âNo, I did not delete it⊠Oh.âÂ
âThe very last tweet, believe it or not⊠Elon Musk.â He sent me a screenshot.Â
âInstagram makes people depressed & Twitter makes people angry,â Musk had mused, minutes before Haddadâs own post about Tweetbot going silent for the last time. Twitterâs chief rake-stepper ended his tweet with a question, âWhich is better?âÂ
For Tapbots, itâs clearly Mastodon, where it can once again build its product its way â and remind Elon Musk: you have no power here.