Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy Launch Indigo ⇥ aaron.vegh.ca
Maybe you are in the market for a great Bluesky client. Maybe you are in the market for a great Mastodon client. Maybe you are in the market for a combination great Bluesky and Mastodon client.
Today, Ben McCarthy and I are launching Indigo. It’s a full-featured client for both Mastodon and Bluesky, available on iPhone, iPad and macOS. Go get it on the App Store!
I have been using Indigo for a while as my primary iOS client for Bluesky and Mastodon, and I think it is terrific. I would happily use it as a standalone app for either. Mixing the two services in one app, though, is better than I had imagined. Everything feels right: posts are colour-coded, you can reply with either account, and there are clever ways of handling existing cross-posting.
Indigo will automatically detect when a post is duplicated across both networks. If the content is very similar and they both appear within a few minutes as each other, Indigo will merge them so you’re not seeing them twice. You can toggle between each version as well as perform actions like quoting or replying to both posts simultaneously. We’ve done a lot to make the experience of using two different services at once feel seamless.
This kind of app might not work for everyone. I understand the arguments for treating these worlds entirely differently. For me, though, this is a little bit like how I prefer reading email newsletters in my RSS app: my brain is not differentiating between articles on a website and articles sent by email when I just want to read all the new articles. Likewise, I am rarely thinking I need to check Bluesky or I need to check Mastodon; I am usually just in the mood to scroll through or post on social media. Indigo scratches that itch.
There is a caveat. Though Indigo supports multiple accounts of each type, only one of each can be active at a time. This makes sense and, I expect, would have no impact for most people. For those of us with accounts for different purposes, however, it does mean it is slightly more cumbersome than the way account switching typically works in a single-service client. This is, for me, a reasonable compromise.
Open standards are pretty great, hey?