Like users, app developers are fleeing Twitter and moving to Mastodon en masse.
When Twitter updated its Terms of Service to ban third-party clients, the company closed an important chapter in its history. Unlike most of its competitors, which tightly and precisely control what developers have access to, Twitter has a long history with independent app developers.
Like users, app developers are fleeing Twitter
Today, these developers are turning to another platform, Mastodon. Tapbots, the studio behind Tweetbot, recently launched Ivory, a Mastodon client based on its Twitter app. Matteo Villa, to whom we owe Fenix, is testing his own Mastodon client called Wooly. Junyu Kuang, a freelance Spring client developer, is working on the Mastodon Mona application. Shihab Mehboob, the creator of Aviary, will launch the Mastodon Mammoth client very soon. And the list of developers who have “gone to the side of the enemy”has been getting longer and longer since Elon Musk took over the reins of Twitter. Mastodon now has over 1.5 million users with almost 10,000 copies. And Mastodon’s API-centric approach is attractive to developers.
According to Paul Haddad, behind Tweetbot and Ivory, “[Twitter] has come a long way to open up its platform API, but customers like ours have always been considered second or third class citizens. […] Whereas in Mastodon this is absolutely not the case.” Same story with Thomas Ricoire, who is developing Ice Cubes, launched a few weeks ago. He considered an application with the Twitter API, but the latter “became more and more limited over time.”“Loving open source, I quickly saw an opportunity [in Mastodon],” he explained. Today, the app is hugely popular, with dozens of contributors on GitHub. Even Twitter co-founder Ev Williams uses it.
and arrive at the room on the mastodon
For its part, Mastodon welcomes the interest of developers. According to its founder and CEO Evgeniy Rochko, “Third-party apps are great for the platform because that’s where the biggest users go, and that benefits everyone because they’re the ones that create the content that the whole world reads.”
Thomas Ricoire and Paul Haddad clarified that the official Mastodon apps do not support quotes, but some third-party clients do. Therefore, we should probably expect this feature to appear in official applications. Moreover, Yevgeny Rochko, who had previously been against this idea, also seriously considered it. On each side, third-party clients are adding features not (yet) found in the official apps. “Mastodon is in the same position as Twitter in its infancy, with third-party applications that will have a big impact on the functionality of the product in the future,” explained Thomas Ricoire.
But if Evgeny Rochko is excited about the increase in the number of Mastodon clients, he does not want to rush to repeat their functions. Mastodon is still a non-profit organization with a small team and already a very long roadmap, but this will obviously have an impact going forward.
However, not all Twitter client developers are ready to leave Mastodon. This is the case, for example, with the Tweetings developer. Those on Twitterrific still don’t want to get started with Mastodon. This will certainly depend on what happens next with Mastodon. If the platform manages to maintain this growth, it is possible. And Evgeny Rochko is interested not only in the number of new users, but also in the quality of those who come: “For me, the most interesting thing about these latest waves of users on Mastodon is not their number, but their personality. People belong to journalistic structures, media, political organizations, the world of cinema, write or are real celebrities on the Internet.