A new application of Mastodon call Mammoth it has achieved 10.000 downloads in the first days of its availability in the App Store. The app has been created by a team including Aviary app developer for Twitter, which was one of those unceremoniously removed by Twitter earlier this year after its new owner, Elon Musk, decided that the broader app ecosystem no longer needed third-party Twitter clients.
That decision left longtime Twitter apps in the lurch, but led several app developers to turn their attention to the open source decentralized social network Mastodon. Last month, for example, the maker of the popular Twitter client Tweetbot released a new Mastodon app called Ivory, after Elon Musk's API changes dropped the company's Twitter-focused predecessor without warning.
Now Mammoth enters the market to offer users yet another option.
Unlike Ivory, which is a attempt to build a business to replace closing losses of Tweetbot, Mammoth -for the moment, at least- It's free with no in-app purchases. However, the company has said it plans to offer a subscription version of Mammoth and its community, moth.social, but has not yet finalized the details.
In the meantime, its short-term goal is to encourage adoption of Mastodon, the company explains in a blog post.
…we do not believe that our subscription will be paid or that the free users go get a read-only version of the app or from moth.social. Simply: we want to contribute to Mastodon having 10 million active users, and then 100 million. It's still early days and we don't want to do anything to slow down adoption," writes Bart Decrem, co-founder of Mammoth. So, we probably have a subscription, but it won't stop you from enjoying the app if you don't pay. We still don't have all the details or the timing."
At its launch, The Mammoth app offers access to a rich set of basic features, such as the ability to navigate and switch between Mastodon timelines; post content, including text, images, GIFs, polls; use features such as private messages, lists, and bookmarks; change the icon and theme of the application; activate a dark mode; access multiple accounts; and even undo posts with a custom duration, similar to Twitter. There are many gestures and options customization so that Mammoth adapts to you.
The app also has a rich set of less common features such as threading tools, picture-in-picture to pin posts to the screen, tools to view AR media, sentiment analysis tools, the ability to hide answers, translation tools during writing, etc. As an iOS app, the users can benefit from Siri Shortcuts, Face ID and Touch ID, Share Extensions, and VoiceOver support. The app will also be coming to macOS soon, the company says.
What's potentially more interesting than all of Mammoth's bells and whistles is its approach to user onboarding.
It has often been said that choosing a server is one of the hardest parts of setting up Mastodon. Adds a layer of complexity to the setup process when users expect to be able to simply create a username and password as they are accustomed to in other social media. But joining a server is part of what it means to participate in Mastodon and the larger group of interconnected servers known as Fediverso, so it cannot be ignored.
To facilitate this process, Mammoth features a simplified user interface that guides users through the account setup process, including creating their profile. It also tackles the problem of who to follow on Mastodon, introducing an interface to find suggested users from all categories, something Twitter did back in the day as well.
Although consumer interest in Mastodon may have waned since Musk's acquisition of Twitter, interest in Fediverse continues to grow.
Before Musk closed the deal with Twitter, Fediverse - which includes Mastodon and other social apps - had more than 570.000 monthly users. Today, the network has about 2,57 million. Companies are also starting to take notice. The owner of Tumblr has talked about adopting the same protocol as Mastodon, and Flickr has considered doing the same. The Medium blogging site was introduced to Fediverse last month with the launch of its own community.
Mammoth is confident in the potential of Fediverse and the decentralized internet in general.
The company says that in addition to running its own instance, it will open source it and ultimately intends to make Mastodon easier to use for the next 10 million users, and then the next 100 million. This is an ambitious goal, considering that Twitter only had 237,8 million monetizable daily active users in the last quarter of its history as a public company, versus Facebook's 2.000 billion daily active users in its most recent results. It remains to be seen if a group of decentralized applications will be able to carve out a big enough niche for themselves in the shadow of the tech giants.. But it's arguably a more promising development than web3, which has squandered consumer trust by allowing scammers and Ponzi schemes to proliferate.
Mammoth is a free download for iPhone and iPad and is coming to Mac soon.
