Paul Haddad 
John Davis“Get them flowermound client boys on it”
Drew Pickard
Chris Hamilton
Matt Banks@paul @daringfireball Take my money - Ivory / Tweetbot for Bluesky would be an instant purchase
Niléane@paul @daringfireball I don’t think investing in VC-backed, US-based Bluesky is a good long-term business decision for any third-party developers.
@paul But if you do start working on a Bluesky client, I hope you won’t stop actively developing Ivory. It’d be a huge loss for the platform.🥺
Jérôme
Adam Demasi@nileane @paul @daringfireball It’s not a good business decision to stick to the small Mastodon/ActivityPub market either. At least ATProto is being picked up by a few other projects now, so 3rd party servers/clients can continue if Bluesky blows up. Would still need someone to step up and run the core infrastructure, but that’s perfectly doable.
@kirb @paul @daringfireball I don't think it's "perfectly doable" considering the staggering cost that a new actor would need to cover to take over, plus the fact that governance of the protocol is still solely in the hands of Bluesky.
Say what you will, the reality today is that the ATProto platform is centralized, and its fate depends entirely on how Bluesky (the company) fares — and how the Trump administration wants to treat it.
@nileane Yes I’m aware, hard not to when fedi have been crying about it constantly for the past 2 months (I say this with the opinion that AT really could have been just a bunch of extensions to ActivityPub). The point was that a far larger market exists, it would make Ivory more profitable, that speeds up development of features, and Mastodon users reap the benefits of that.
Mastodon does hold a 501(c)(3) in the US due to some complications with their gGmbH in Germany, so it’s not exactly isolated from US influence. Other than the potential of compelling data out of US-run instances anyway, which can still reveal a lot about users on foreign-run instances.
@kirb “Crying about it” is a pretty condescending way of framing people's understandable outrage at the fact that Bluesky is repeatedly presented as a decentralized alternative to the Fediverse when in reality it is not — or at the very least, not about to be.
@nileane I say that because it isn’t winning users over to fedi, it’s pushing them away because it’s not a welcoming environment. I get it, and like I said, I agree. But the way it’s discussed here doesn’t come off as wanting to actually see any change in Bluesky/AT. There’s plenty of work Mastodon needs, like in UX and consideration of features people like in Bluesky, that would be more beneficial than repeating the same points of what the competition is doing wrong.
Mastodon Migration@mastodonmigration @nileane You missed that we’re in agreement on that (that’s why I follow you!), and I listed some actionable things Mastodon can do to better compete with Bluesky. Love what you do, but this is the behavior I’m talking about that’s doing the opposite of helping sell fedi to the world. We can do better.
@mastodonmigration @nileane I wrote an iOS Twitter client in 2013-2014, cancelled and never released it because I felt it wasn’t worth the considerable time I put into it vs how little they cared about me, if you remember the 100,000 user limit. I can’t stand for such a shitty power move against the little guys, and it’s one of the main reasons why I moved here.
A large portion of fedi (could be the majority) are people who felt abandoned by the direction of Twitter, that includes Eugen back in 2016. We all want this to win. Which means we need to look at why others are succeeding, and see what we can do to match or be better than them. Mastodon falls short in UX in a number of ways (I’m sure you’ve heard all of them) and it would be a better use of energy to focus on what we can do right, rather than what others are doing wrong.
As it stands, Bluesky/Twitter seem very approachable to non-techy people. Bluesky gets to be seen as “Twitter how it was a decade ago”, and people really enjoy that. They’ll keep getting easy wins despite their poor story on federation and profitability if we can only argue about them, and not reflect on ourselves.
I hope this makes sense? I’m looking at it as an engineer who likes to really get UX right, and understand where the product can get some wins without letting enshittification seep in. (Maybe I’ll contribute to Mastodon someday, I already work on way too many FOSS projects)
*edit: 100,000 was the user limit, not 1 million
@kirb @mastodonmigration Aye, this is quite out of topic I feel.
My point was to say that investing in Bluesky is not a good long term business decision considering the political state of the country it is based in and the very nature of the way the platform is built — I don’t see how that relates to attracting people over to the Fediverse. (Especially since my post is a reply to a thread, not some standalone Fediverse advocacy post)
Still, I think you’re right to remind us all of the fiasco that the Twitter API fallout was. Given the current state of things, it is my opinion that such a fiasco could happen again in some way were Bluesky to change its stance towards supporting its API, or even simply in regards to its political stance in relation to the Trump administration. When that does happen, third-party developers will once again be among those who suffer the consequences, right next to the users themselves .
It’s easy to declare Bluesky the “winner” of whatever battle people think this is. But maybe winning isn’t just about garnering the attention of the most people you can. Maybe the smartest “business decision” here (to use Parker Orlani’s words) is to remain a part of something that’s been around for close to a decade and steadily growing, rather than yet another nascent VC-funded platform.
@nileane @mastodonmigration Sorry, yeah, kinda off track. I think you’re right about not needing to win. Mastodon doesn’t need to be perfect, but it can do with help being more welcoming.
My poorly explained point was that Bluesky support in Ivory can bring more interest in Mastodon as a side-effect, we also get benefits from Bluesky’s popularity because it’ll encourage faster dev cycles on the app. Indulging the bad things about Bluesky to make good things happen for Mastodon. We’ll see what comes of Bluesky when the investors want their return, or the US tries to compel something out of them. I imagine any bad decisions will make people show up here anyway, so with time it might not even matter.
Aaron Czichon@nileane Currently no one should trust any company based in the US 🙈
GBlishen
Matt@paul Pretty please?
Matthew Bradley@paul @daringfireball — @gruber has to have a preview Test Flight build of Tapestry, right? I have felt his not naming it, ever since his critique of OpenVibe https://daringfireball.net/2025/01/openvibe (which, as described, feels like I agree with him... but the lack of noting Tapestry exists/will exist for the rest of us to try seemed weird).
@paul @daringfireball @gruber Now, that said: when does TapBots make a Tweetbot for Bluesky, eh?
I will pay for both of them. As I did for Twitterrific and Tweetbot!
shellsharks@mbradley @paul @daringfireball @gruber Called this out a while back. Lotta folks would be excited to pay for it. 30 mil and growing folks.
Graeme K
Mike Beasley@paul @daringfireball Over on Bluesky we’ve all seen you and Mark signed up in November. We’re all holding out hope.
Chris De Jabet
Rasmus Grouleff (he/him)@paul Once you've seen one VC-backed social media, you’ve seen them all..
Wu Evar 🇪🇺🇺🇦@paul While I know what you might be teasing I can't wrap my head around the blog post:
"But what I can’t wrap my head around is the business decision of developers to lean into Mastodon clients versus Bluesky ones."
Most of the Mastodon clients were created when there was no BlueSky with 30mio users. There wasn't even BlueSky with public access and more then 1mio users.
So what is he talking about? Unfortunately he says he is on Mastodon, but only links to his BlueSky account.
Jonathan Rollans@maschinentraum @paul right? I don’t get that statement either, especially considering he was around when all the Mastodon clients started being built, so he witnessed it firsthand.
Tyler Loch
Jason Cox@paul It’s funny, part of the reason I joined Mastodon was because y’all made Ivory and BlueSky as a network just seemed barren. Folks were either on Twitter or here.
Now the normies are running from the Nazis and are mistakingly going there.
Tim Johnsen
Andrew Laurence
Natha@paul TestFlight coming soon?
Geekfried™️@paul plz! 🥰
Nikos Bournas
Simon Rolfmore@paul @daringfireball I have to admit I'm in exactly this boat. I like Bluesky but it just doesn't work for me without a synced client due to how my brain works. I would pay again for Skeetbot or whatever, either alongside Ivory or as an extra subscription.
Matt Cooney
John Parron@paul if you create a client app, please call it ebony.
Kyle Bradbury@paul everyone is asking for Ivory for BlueSky when really they should be asking for BlueSky support in Ivory
marlies 
Leon Cowle
Elliot Vos
Eshu Marneedi@paul @daringfireball PLEASE PAUL I AM BEGGING YOU TAKE MY MONEY
Jemaleddin Cole@paul are you going to make us beg?
iamisaactorres@paul @daringfireball if Ivory could be made for BS…and cross posting enabled my god
Ben@paul cmon, Paul, please!
Samer Farha@paul if you need testers…
Tom@samerfarha @paul seconded…
FreediverX
galonsky@paul let’s goooo
Paul Kratt@paul I had been thinking about setting up my own SkyBridge instance just because I don’t like the official Bsky app and how updates come in.
Having both in one app without the adapter would be so nice.
Caleb@paul I am not renewing my Ivory subscription. Three reasons:
1. Bluesky feeds are coming through bots here. Tired of seeing unremarkable verbage.
2. If Tapbots spends its resource on Bluesky then the Mastodon development takes a lower priority.
3. The US dollar is costing more vs the CDN $. Expensive and will get worse.
When Twitter stopped your ability with Tweetbot? a lot of us did not request the refund. It wasn't a matter of money. Now it seems it is for the company.
1
1. Bluesky feeds are coming through bots here. Tired of seeing unremarkable verbage.
2. If Tapbots spends its resource on Bluesky then the Mastodon development takes a lower priority.
3. The US dollar is costing more vs the CDN $. Expensive and will get worse.
When Twitter stopped your ability with Tweetbot? a lot of us did not request the refund. It wasn't a matter of money. Now it seems it is for the company.
1
Tereza Artifex@paul please!
Carlos
Federico Viticci 