I had a dead body on my phone, and I kept checking it. Since January 12, my favorite Twitter app for iOS had been locked in stasis, frozen in an error modal informing me that “there was a problem authenticating with Twitter,” and wow, was it ever there. Without prior notice, Twitter has revoked the primary login credentials for Tweetbot and all other third-party clients that are not operated by Twitter.
Unlike many decisions made during Twitter’s “vox populi” Roman cosplay era, there was never a poll on this. Elon Musk had never appeared deep in a thread with Kevin Sorbo and a Spartan avatar burner account to say, “Whoops, third-party apps should go.” Instead, it took Twitter several days to reach out to its users or business partners and admit the move was deliberate, eventually releasing an official “his fault”-style tweet that gnomishly explains that “Twitter is enforcing its longstanding API rules.”
Meanwhile, I kept reopening this dead app on my phone, navigating with sheer muscle memory.
Meanwhile, I kept reopening this dead app on my phone, navigating on pure muscle memory to the same error popup on the last post my timeline saw: a freeze. Lord of the Rings GIF of King Théoden taunting: “You have no power here.” This app had been one of my main ways of accessing Twitter for over a decade, so I was used to feeling powerless. But this repetitive ghost robbery felt like a new low point.
“You are definitely not alone,” Paul Haddad assured me, and I believed him because he co-created Tweetbot. “I know a lot of people who have had to remove it just to prevent that from happening.”
This pure interface rictus state had no other real outlet. Yeah, if I poked around a bit, I could tweak Tweetbot’s error protocols enough to scroll through whatever segment of the timeline it had loaded into memory just before the end. But the only reward was being able to use Tweetbot’s well-honed tweet-reading experience to review posts from January 12 endlessly. The pleasant haptic jolt I received when bookmarking a mutual’s January 12 announcement that they were “built like a worm” was a lie; never registered. Without any ability to re-authenticate with Twitter, the Tweetbot interface was all he had left.
All of this context, from Tweetbot’s error message to its short-term memory of cached content, was designed to be ephemeral, just something you’d see when your signal went out or if Twitter went down.
“We certainly had to deal with blackouts in the past, the whole Fail Whale era,” Haddad said. “We definitely didn’t think it would end that way.”
No one does a product design sprint on how their app should behave in case it unexpectedly no longer exists.
No one does a product design sprint on how their app should behave in case it unexpectedly no longer exists.
Haddad’s three-person company, Tapbots, handled all of this as gracefully as one might expect someone to handle a direct attack on their livelihood. Approximately ten days after the app was taken offline, the team issued a chose strong for its creation, without hesitating to say that they had “spent over 10 years building Tweetbot for Twitter and it was shut down in the blink of an eye.” The Tapbots tribute joined the sentiments of its heartbroken superusers, who happily paid a few bucks a year for access to its handcrafted iconography and expertly rounded corners. (“One of the best apps I’ve ever usedpraised Apple ultra-blogger John Gruber.) Like many other Twitter insiders disappointed in the company’s fickle policymaking and ego-driven roadmap, Tapbots surveyed the wreckage and decided to migrate. With a grim but dignified paragraph break, Tapbots announced a new approach for the company: Ivory, a fledgling Mastodon client based on everything he had learned creating Tweetbot, as well as much of his code.
As a long-time Mastodon account holder who nonetheless still feels like a newbie to the platform, I’m happy to see Tapbots bring their talents to Fediverse’s loose-knit social island scatterplot. The experience of joining Mastodon really depends on which server you start on – the particular people you associate with Twitter have already dispersed, if they’re still here at all. A tool like fat finder either Debirdify it will produce a payload of ordered data that you can use to massively track people where they’ve landed, but it can also be spread over two dozen servers. Part of Twitter’s double helix of horror and intrigue was that everyone was swimming in the same pool: you and your weird friends, the Russian disinformation forces, and Shaq. On Mastodon, each server has its own culture, and you can only join one server per account, so there is a feeling that everyone is playing in a slightly different room. When I first installed Ivory, I felt some hope that a little familiarity could go a long way.
Having used Ivory for several months now, I can say that while Mastodon doesn’t feel much like Twitter, Ivory does at least feel like Tweetbot, and that’s been enough to give the whole experience a comforting glow which, in turn, makes me happy. helped hug Mastodon. I asked Haddad if this was intentional. “That has been one of our goals,” he told me, “to make it as easy and transparent as possible. Obviously, Twitter and Mastodon are two different things, but to be honest, I like Twitter.” He paused to correct himself. “Well, I appreciated Twitter.”
“Obviously, Twitter and Mastodon are two different things, but to be honest, I like Twitter… Well, I appreciated Twitter.”
This was not just a comment on regime change. Haddad recounted how Twitter used to feelespecially in their early days of pre-algorithmic feeding. “A simple social network where people post and reply to each other. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that then, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it now, and if we can provide that experience, I’m more than happy to do it,” he said. Focusing on a classic flavor of Twitter requires some sacrifices at this early stage. Ivory doesn’t let you play too much with Mastodon’s decentralized nuances, for example; You can’t use it to browse servers you haven’t joined or browse the social graphs of interesting people in other communities. The most prominent view that Ivory offers is a simple timeline of the accounts you have specifically followed. You can also browse the local server you joined or branch to a larger, chaotic federated feed, all with the same smooth scrolling action as Tweetbot because (as Haddad confirmed) it’s literally the same scroll handling feature. Ivory, at least in this childish form, makes you feel comfortable shrinking Mastodon’s space of multidimensional possibilities into simple 2D feeds that fit a well-established framework.
Tapbots do what I would call “stubborn software”, which is a hard phrase to say because it can be complementary or indirect depending on the context. But the idea is that simply throwing every possible feature of Twitter or Mastodon at a user’s feet like a container of Legos doesn’t really help them use it successfully. “One thing I don’t like to do, and it’s hard to put it down, is have a million settings in the app,” Haddad said, confidently accepting my stubborn software tag. “We try very hard to keep the number of configurations low to minimize it to just the things that are really important, and then just make things work as automatically as possible.”
This kind of taste-driven dance direction can help bring the ideal form of a deck into focus as it evolves.
Tweetbot rose to fame by having opinions on the best way to reply to tweets (with a friendly but deliberate swipe) or push them (tapping once to expose likes and retweets, again subtly nudged you to reconsider). These learned behaviors aren’t necessarily obvious at first, even if they eventually become natural enough to introduce the kind of compulsion that inspired this piece, and Tweetbot’s orientation toward multi-touch virtuosos probably left some growth on the table. Tapbots also made some firm modifications to the Twitter experience. You had to swipe on a tweet to see its stats, for example, exactly the kind of decision you’d never see on an official Twitter app optimized for an endless engagement flyer. Skillfully implemented, this kind of taste-driven dance direction can help bring a deck’s ideal shape into focus as it evolves, and Mastodon’s still-bubbly primordial soup will benefit.
When I spoke to Haddad, I didn’t feel like I was talking to someone who was still suffering. He and Tapbots have embraced the haphazard destruction of a decade’s work and salvaged the best bits in a new chapter for the company.
“Now that we’re out, it’s interesting not to have to worry about the Twitter stuff anymore,” Haddad said. “I’m just chilling out and seeing what the latest bullshit is.”
I asked Haddad if he still had Tweetbot on his phone and, if so, which tweet it froze on after the extinction event.
“Let me see,” he said, scrolling a bit, frowning at his screen. “Maybe I deleted it,” she ventured softly. She spent a little more. “No, I didn’t delete it… Oh.”
“Last tweet, believe it or not… Elon Musk.” He sent me a screenshot.
“Instagram makes people depressed and Twitter makes people angry,” Musk said. meditatedminutes before Haddad’s own post about the silence of Tweetbot for the last time. Twitter’s head rake-stepper ended his tweet with a question: “Which is better?”
For Tapbots, it’s clearly Mastodon, where you can once again build your product your way, and remind Elon Musk: You have no power here.
