The summer months I’m experimenting with some different content for the weekly report articles. For more information on that, see this accompanying post. Today I’m taking a look at all the different client apps for the fediverse that I’m paying attention to. This is not meant as a recommendation on which client you should use; my experience is that people’s preferences for clients are highly individualistic. The best client for you is simply the client that you enjoy using the most. This is an overview of some the clients for the fediverse that do something differently, and stand out because of that. Part of the reason for making this list is that I do not have the time to keep a close eye on literally every client in the fediverse, and I’m curious to hear from readers if they feel like I missed some.
Microblogging
Phanpy (Web, Progressive Web App) Phanpy is one of the most innovative clients for any social media platform. The Catch-up feature takes all the posts from your home timeline and gives you the ability to sort and filter them in any way you want. You can filter posts by replies, reposts, followed hashtags, sort them by date or engagement numbers, or group them by author. Another unique feature is the ‘boost carousel’, where boost are delegated in the timeline to a separate horizontal-scrolling ‘carousel’.
One thing that stands out to me about Phanpy is how these standout features have not really seen adoption by other clients, neither for the fediverse nor for Bluesky. Phanpy does have a crowd of hardcore fans (I’m one of them), but it seems to mainly resonate with power-users.
Ivory (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, paid) Ivory is made by the small company Tapbots, who also created popular Twitter client Tweetbot. Ivory focuses on design, and has some additional features such as account statistics as well. Ivory is a popular client for Mastodon, even though it has a monthly subscription. That makes it also a client worth watching: is the Mastodon ecosystem large enough to support a small team of three developers? Tapbots recently announced that they are building a Bluesky client, and they were frank about needing another revenue stream besides Ivory.
Fedilab (Android, F-Droid) Fedilab is one of the older clients for the fediverse, that supports multiple accounts on a variety of fediverse platforms. It can be used in combination with Mastodon, Pleroma, PixelFed, PeerTube, Misskey, Friendica and even GNU Social. There are few other clients that I know of that focus on supporting a large variety of fediverse platforms, which indicates both the technical challenge of doing so with none of the platforms supporting the client-to-server part of ActivityPub, as well as it being unclear if there is a real demand for it.
Mastodon (Android, iOS) The apps developed by the Mastodon organisation itself. Mastodon now has a full-time iOS developer as well as an Android developer, and the app is always up to date with Mastodon’s latest features, such as Mastodon’s recent work on quote post implementations. An ecosystem of third-party clients for Mastodon could proliferate partially because Mastodon was strapped for developer resources and the apps did not always get the highest priority. Third-party clients for Mastodon are often created by hobby developers, who now have to compete with Mastodon having full-time paid developers on their app, making it more important for other clients to show a clear value-add above the Mastodon client developed by the organisation itself.
Some other microblogging clients worth pointing out: Whalebird, (desktop client for Windows, Linux and macOS, supporting multiple platforms), IceCubes (free, open-source iOS app), Tusky (the most popular third-party Android app for Mastodon with half a million downloads), Trunks (web, Android and iOS, that has some cool additional timeline filtering features) and Elk (a popular web client for Mastodon)
Another thing that stands out to me is how there do not seem to be clients targeted specifically for Misskey that are popular. Clients like Kimis, Kaiteki and Milktea seem to have little use or no recent updates. The MissCat app might be more popular, but it is not available in the EU so it is hard for me to judge.
Multi-network clients
Openvibe (Android, iOS) Openvibe is a multi-network client for Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads. It combines posts from these networks (provided you have an account on that network) into a single timeline, and you can post directly to all the different networks at once. Openvibe is the most popular of these multi-network clients, and is also the best funded of the clients on the new social networks: early in 2025 Openvibe announced an $800k funding round. The company expects to introduce a subscription plan at a later point to generate revenue.
SoraSNS (iOS) SoraSNS is another multi-network client, that supports Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky, Pleroma and Nostr. It also has a algorithmic timeline with the algorithm running locally on your phone. SoraSNS has more of such experimental features, such as analytics per-post and AI summaries.
Reader clients
Surf (Android, iOS, in beta) Surf describes itself as a ‘browser for the open social web’. The app, made by Flipboard, integrates various platforms: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and RSS are supported. It centers around creating feeds for topics, and users can share these feeds with each other (either via Surf or as a custom feed on Bluesky). Surf stands out for pushing the boundaries on what a social media client can look like, and for the large amount of control that users get over which content they want to see.
Tapestry (iOS, iPadOS, in beta) Tapestry is made by Iconfactory, the company behind popular Twitter client Twitterfic, and raised funds via a Kickstarter, raising $177k. It is a reader client that combines a large variety of sources: RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, Tumblr, podcasts, YouTube and more. Tapestry places all these sources into a single chronological timeline. The funding model for Tapestry is what stands out: making high-quality apps is not cheap, but getting a large enough paying user base to sustain development is hard. Iconfactory could lean upon their previous work to get a solid Kickstarter to fund development.
Rest of the fediverse
PeerTube is developing their own mobile apps, and have just completed a fundraiser of €75k for further features. I’ve covered the app in other places in more detail, and for here I think it’s noteworthy that no other major PeerTube app has gotten traction over the years.
For the Threadiverse, there are a variety of clients for Lemmy, with some of the most popular ones being Voyager, Thunder, Mlem, Jerboa and Photon. My sense is that the Threadiverse clients do not differ much in features, and mainly differ in platforms and terms of design. The main standout feature at this point seems to be support for PieFed, but a variety of clients (including Voyager, Mlem and multiple more now support PieFed). It points to an ecosystem where clients are aware of each other, and new innovations get rapidly copied by other clients, bringing them effectively to the entire ecosystem. If there are unique features in Threadiverse clients that you think I should pay attention to, let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.
Fediverse News and Links
Move Slowly and Build Bridges is the new book by Robert W. Gehl, in which Gehl documents the story of the fediverse and how everyday people have build a ‘noncentralized alternative social media system’ over the years. The book is now available for sale online, with physical copies shipping soon. I’ll definitely write more about the book once I’ve read it, so stay tuned!
Mastodon is adding an in-app donation request for the funding of Mastodon. Mastodon is rolling out this feature very carefully (only their own mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers for now), but they are already thinking about how to expand the feature and make it available for other server admins as well.
Some polishing updates for WordPress ActivityPub as their blog post explains how they are working towards more social integrations with the rest of the fediverse, with more coverage by WeDistribute.
How To Improve Your Privacy and Security on Mastodon is a highly extensive guide on Privacy Guides that goes into in-depth detail on all the possibilities people have on Mastodon for better security and privacy.
Mastodon has released a new major update with version 4.4, that come with a variety of tweaks to make existing systems smoother, focusing on profiles, lists and some improvement to navigation. The update introduces profile featuring, with adds a ‘featured’ tab to a profile, and allows users to highlight specific hashtags they post about and other accounts they want to promote. Mastodon has also reorganised pinned posts into a carousel, making it quicker to navigate between featured content and recent posts on profiles. Profiles now also show how many people you follow are also following that account. List management also sees some improvements, making it simpler to organise accounts into custom feeds. The audio player also has gotten a visual refresh with better controls and new keyboard shortcuts, and the mobile web interface now features a bottom toolbar that mimics native apps and provides more timeline space.
Mastodon is also adding the long-requested feature of quote posts. However, this will be done in two phases: the current update 4.4 properly displays quote posts made by other fediverse software, such as Misskey. In the next update, 4.5, Mastodon will add the ability to create quote posts as well.An important new features of this update is not mentioned in the announcement post, and are hidden away for server admins to manually opt-in to. Mastodon server admins can now set referral headers, which means that when people click on a link on Mastodon the other side will see that people came from that Mastodon server. Up until now other websites such as news organisations had no insight in how much of their traffic came from Mastodon, which makes marketing departments less likely to invest in platforms like Mastodon. However, since the setting is opt-in and not being promoted that it is worthwhile for Mastodon server admins to turn this setting on, it is unclear how many servers will actually enable the setting.
The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) will go into effect later this month, which has requirements for all platforms that handle user-generated content and have “links with the United Kingdom” to conduct and publish a risk assessment. If a platform is “likely to be accessed by children” and permits pornographic content, the platform is required to implement “highly effective” age verification. Bluesky announced their implementation of such an age verification system this week, and I wrote about the different responses from within the communities to the requirement and implementation. When I asked Mastodon on how they are handling the OSA for the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers, Mastodon said: “Mastodon gGmbH has made efforts to understand the requirements of the UK Online Safety Act. As a small community-funded non-profit we are still aligning on a way forward for people in the UK who have accounts on our owned/operated Mastodon servers.” Mastodon also referred to work by IFTAS and the Open Rights Group as guidance for other server operators. I personally have found this guide by Russ Garret helpful in understanding the OSA as well. To me it seems likely that at least some fediverse servers would meet the requirements of the OSA to implement an age verification system (IANAL!), and that this will likely be a story that we’ll come back to over the coming weeks.
Link aggregator platform PieFed has added support for a plugin system. This allows people to build extensions and new features for the platform without it having to be integrated into the main codebase. Plugin systems can be powerful for social platforms, but also depend on what plugins people will actually build. Lemmy has also been building a plugin system, which will likely be released as part of their upcoming 1.0 launch later this year. PieFed also released a configuration for Anubis, a system to prevent AI scrapers from accessing a website. Meanwhile, the foundation which hosts the most popular Lemmy server, lemmy.world, has started a PieFed server as well.
Rimu, the developer of PieFed, has also released a demonstration of how scaling over ActivityPub can be more efficient, by bundling activities up in chunks. ActivityPub is a “chatty” protocol, which can quickly result in a large number of requests made over the network. As Rimu explains: “The problem is that if 20 people cast 5 votes and those votes are federated to 500 servers, the instance hosting the community needs to do 20 * 5 * 500 = 50,000 network requests.” By batching the activities into chunks, the number of requests over the network can be significantly lower, at the cost of less-than-realtime federation.
Independent fediverse developer Steve Bate wrote a long article on the state of ActivityPub, focusing on the Client-to-Server part of the protocol, that I think is worth a read. The ActivityPub protocol consists of two major parts: Server-to-Server (S2S) and Client-to-Server (C2S). The S2S part of ActivityPub is concerned with federation: making sure independent servers are compatible by providing a standard format on how different softwares can communicate with each other. This part of ActivityPub is widely used, and when people talk about the ActivityPub protocol, they are almost always exclusively talking about the S2S part of the protocol. The C2S part of the protocol is concerned with how clients (mobile apps for example) can communicate with any fediverse server. This part of ActivityPub is almost unused, and almost no platform in the fediverse supports C2S. Instead, all platforms have developed their own standards for how clients can interoperate with their platform. In practice this means that people building a new microblogging platform on the fediverse will have to implement the Mastodon API in order to make the current apps (for example Ivory or Phanpy) compatible with the new platform. The article by Bate goes into more detail on how this situation came to be, why C2S still matters, and how to move forward with C2S adoption.
The Social Web Foundation is experimenting with a geosocial ActivityPub client. It allows users to log in with their existing fediverse account and check into places. These places are tagged with geo-data, based on OpenStreetMap data that has been translated into ActivityPub format (ActivityStreams 2 objects, technically speaking). The goal of the project is to provide more exposure to parts of ActivityPub that have gotten less attention. It is also an illustration of the problems with C2S mentioned above: testing the new project of the SWF requires a fediverse account on a server that supports C2S, of which there are very few.
Upcoming social networking platform Bonfire is getting closer to an official release, and while the platform is working on getting the software ready for release, major new features are still being added. The latest update adds long-form publishing (the update itself was published on Bonfire), new custom feeds for events and blogs, and more. The challenge with Bonfire has never been a dearth of cool new features however, but to get the platform ready and used by the public.
StartHereSocial is an onboarding service that helps people pick a fediverse server to join. It asks the new user to make a simple choice for their biggest priority: communicating in their own language, connecting with people from the same region, connecting with people over a shared interest or place that is large and reliable. Based on this selection the service shows a curated list of servers to join. The service is created by IFTAS founder Jaz-Michael King, and King also published an accompanying blog post on some of the challenges with helping people onboard to a fediverse server.
GitLab will not be adding ActivityPub to their platform. GitLabis a popular code hosting and collaboration platform that has had a popular feature open for years to add ActivityPub, which also saw quite some work already done by the community on the feature. GitLab said that “While this feature may have merit, we need to prioritize our efforts elsewhere at this time.” Other code collaboration platforms like Forgejo are working on adding ActivityPub support, with some basic social features already implemented.
The WordPress ActivityPub plugin released their v7.0. The update mainly lays groundwork for becoming a fully-integrated fediverse platform, as it features the technical building blocks for managing and sending follow requests from WordPress. These features are not active yet, but show the direction the team is taking: that of making a WordPress blog a fully social part of the fediverse. The team also added support for the new standard for HTTP Signatures, explained in a new blog post.
FediCon 2025 is a new fediverse conference that will be held on August 1-2 in Vancouver, Canada. It features some well-known names within the fediverse community as speakers, including ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou, Pixelfed and Loops creator Daniel Supernault, Damon Outlaw and Sean Tilley of WeDistribute, Anuj Ahooja from A New Social, and many more. FediCon is organised by Charles Iliya Krempeaux, also known as @reiver.
The FediForum conference is expanding into the physical world, by partnering with SFSCON, an established free software conference held every year in Italy. FediForum will be hosting a fediverse track for the conference, with the goal of both educating potential new users about the fediverse as well as building more connections within the existing fediverse community.
The Fosstodon server is now owned by a new parent organisation, the Fosstodon Foundation. With it also comes a voting platform for the members of the Fosstodon. The Fosstodon server switched ownership in recent months after the previous admins came under criticism from the wider fediverse community regarding one of their moderators. At the time, I noted that fediverse servers need governance systems that can handle admin burnout better, and creating a foundation as the owners of a community server helps with creating a more sustainable ownership structure for the long-term health of the community.
The Canvas Event was this week, where people could collaborate on artwork by individually placing pixels on a shared canvas. The final result gives an indication of the wide variety of communities that participated and are active within the threadiverse side of the fediverse.
Hi @laurenshof I'd like to point out an app that's only been around for a year, developed for Friendica but also perfectly usable with Mastodon. It's a very special app even for those who use it with Mastodon because it's the only existing app that lets you browse Activitypub groups, such as Friendica groups, Lemmy communities, and NodeBB categories, while only displaying topics in the Timeline.
It's also the only app that lets you browse messages in the Timeline with a horizontal scroll.
Finally, for those who use Mastodon forks like mastodon glitch-soc (adopted by infosec.exchange, lgbt.tech, or my own poliversity.it instance), the app features a unique, intuitive formatting toolbar that lets you edit Markdown as easily as writing in Word.
Here you can find a post I wrote some time ago that needs several updates, but which already gives you a general idea of this fantastic Android app.
Raccoon, the Friendica app that also has surprises for Mastodon users (automatic translation from Italian)
Oh yes! #RaccoonForFriendica is the most complete app ever seen for Friendica and, in addition to working with Mastodon, it might be the only app in the world capable of managing the potential of Mastodon Glitch-soc
macfranc
in reply to Laurens Hof • • •Hi @laurenshof
I'd like to point out an app that's only been around for a year, developed for Friendica but also perfectly usable with Mastodon.
It's a very special app even for those who use it with Mastodon because it's the only existing app that lets you browse Activitypub groups, such as Friendica groups, Lemmy communities, and NodeBB categories, while only displaying topics in the Timeline.
It's also the only app that lets you browse messages in the Timeline with a horizontal scroll.
Finally, for those who use Mastodon forks like mastodon glitch-soc (adopted by infosec.exchange, lgbt.tech, or my own poliversity.it instance), the app features a unique, intuitive formatting toolbar that lets you edit Markdown as easily as writing in Word.
Here you can find a post I wrote some time ago that needs several updates, but which already gives you a general idea of this fantastic Android app.
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2024-10-18 14:26:40
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