openvibe

Microblogging continues to disperse between mastodon, bluesky, nostr and threads to pickup twitter slack. While they are all decentralized, they are all decentralized in different ways. mastodon is a federated ActivityPub application. bluesky is a federated identity using the ATProto. nostr is a decentralized protocol that also has some capabilities around federation (fwiw, bluesky was originally intended to be nostr until jack decided that a blockchain is important for it to be truly decentralized). threads is its own thing while also catering to ActivityPub federation. I’ve had to develop identities across all of them and noticing that the twitter base has spread themselves around amongst all of these. These are all signs of a healthy system. The diversity of protocols and clients is good in the long run.

However, there is also an opportunity to build clients that can combine them all to develop a single view for a user. That’s just what openvibe has developed. openvibe’s ios and android clients connect to mastodon, bluesky, nostr (threads coming soon) and presents a unified timeline, ability to x-post to all services and reply to posts using the post’s current service credentials.

The unified timeline works as intended. It’s unified. There are some minor glitches though: it looks like nostr takes the longest to update so you see some jumping around, especially in the case of smaller screens like your phone. It also looks like every time the “home” tab gets control of the view, it decides to refresh and so there is more jumping around than what I’d like. There is no easy way to fix your place, again not a feature that most people are likely asking for.

It would be very interesting to see when threads also comes online as I do have some duplicates between threads and mastodon given threads’s fediverse sharing capabilities. However, that problem is not a real problem in openvibe yet..

Their search functionality across the various networks is well implemented and they also have a trending across networks tab. I have only used it once and it just isn’t something I am interested in or qualified to say if it’s good or not.

The iOS app is universal so it runs on iPhones, iPads and Macs. Their Android app is just as functional but Android is far more sensitive to network load when scrolling and you really see how unoptimized the fetch from networks really is there. Homescreen scrolling is almost always a jittery mess the every time you come back to it.