Twitter abruptly ended a significant part of its history when it silently updated its developer policies and banned 3rd-party clients from its platform. Unlike most of its peers, which tightly control what developers have access to, Twitter has a long history with independent app makers.
As such, the developers of some Twitter clients have also started to turn their attention to Mastodon, the rising Twitter alternative of recent times. The first example also came from Tapbots.
Tapbots, the studio behind Tweebot, released Ivory, a Mastodon client based on its long-running Twitter app, last week. Also, Matteo Villa, the developer behind the Twitter app Fenix, is testing his own Mastodon client, called Wooly. Likewise, Junyu Kuang, the independent developer behind Twitter client Spring, is working on a Mastodon app called Mona. Shihab Mehboob, the developer of Twitter app Aviary, on the other hand, is close to launching a Mastodon client called Mammoth.
The once-Twitter developers join a growing group of independent app makers that have embraced the open-source social network Mastodon, which has seen explosive growth since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The decentralized service currently has more than 1.5 million users on around 10,000 servers. Combined with Mastodon’s open-source, “API first” approach, it seems to have had no trouble catching the attention of dozens of developers eager to add their own interpretations to the service.
Paul Haddad, one of the developers behind Tweetbot and Ivory, says Tapbots had already started working on a Mastodon client late last year when they began to worry about the future of Twitter’s developer platform.
“They (Twitter) were definitely making big strides and opening up API platforms, but clients like ours were always going to be 2nd or 3rd class citizens,” Haddad says. “However, that’s certainly not the case with Mastodon.”
Thomas Ricouard, the developer behind Mastodon app Ice Cubes, which launched earlier this month, also says he’s considered developing an app with Twitter’s API in the past, but has given up on it because “it seems more and more limited as the days go by”.
It seems that Elon Musk managed to offend the developers not long after he took office. Let’s see which other developers will switch to Mastodon…
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