Tapestry ⇥ blog.iconfactory.com

Craig Hockenberry, on the Iconfactory’s blog:

The web has always been in a state of flux, but the rate of change around how people connect has accelerated over the past few years. Centralized systems have shown their weakness and siloed content has as much a chance of surviving as “You’ve got mail!”.

Tapestry was built with this change in mind. Your content comes from a lot of different places, and how that data is retrieved from a feed is entirely customizable. Our goal was to put RSS, social media, podcasts, and more into a flexible and easy-to-read timeline. Tapestry syncs this variety of feeds across devices in a way that is seamless, secure, and easy to understand.

I am not sure I want all of these things inside a single app’s timeline. I typically want to treat reading web feeds as a discrete task, for example, and I would use a dedicated podcast client instead. But I like the idea of a merged social media feed. Some people have accounts on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog, while others are on only one of those services. I would often like to see all of them at the same time.

Tapestry reminds me of Twitterrific in a lot of ways, and is conceptually similar to the new Reeder. I do not care for the default font and I am a little peeved the system font is behind a paywall, but it is making me consider a subscription so maybe it is working as intended. What I would really like — and I do not mean to sound ungrateful or demanding — is a MacOS client. There are many excellent Mastodon clients for iOS, and the first-party Bluesky app is good as well. But the MacOS Bluesky client ecosystem is disappointingly weak, especially if you still use an Intel-based model.

The good news is that this is a burgeoning category of apps. That makes me very excited. The material published on social media has been tied for too long to the platforms themselves. That is true in part because of advertising revenue, but also because platform owners do not trust users. Instead of being allowed control over our experiences, we are required to endure the changes du jour. A social web built on open protocols is an opportunity to change all of that. Bring it on.