One of the best things about Mastodon is the sheer number of apps available for it. The official Mastodon app is fine, but thereâs also Ivory, Mona, Fedilab, Ice Cubes, Elk, Mastoot, and many others. This openness is part of the whole appeal of the ActivityPub-powered social networking ecosystem, and it has already led to some solid new ideas. (Iâve personally been a very happy Ivory user for a while now.)
Technology
The new Mammoth app is a much simpler take on Mastodon
Mammoth’s Smart Lists, For You feed, and suggested follows are meant to make it easier for new users to explore Mastodon and the rest of the ActivityPub-powered fediverse.
Mammoth won some fans earlier this year with a really nicely designed Mastodon client, and then added a âFor Youâ feed that makes Mammoth a little more automatically personalized. Now, with the launch of Mammoth 2 for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, the app is going even deeper into curation and personalization: itâs launching a series of âSmart Listsâ filled with good posts, a set of suggested people and accounts to follow, and more.
Smart Lists are a lot like what Twitter lists used to be: users curate groups of people by topic or interest or whatever else, and others can subscribe to those lists. Mammoth has a couple dozen of them so far â everything from âSpaceâ and âNatureâ to âIndiewebâ and âQueertechâ â each of which is curated by a specific Mammoth user. Iâve been beta-testing the app the last few days, and the lists are handy, if not exactly earth-shattering. Most lists are filled with websites and well-known posters, so theyâre more like a starting point than a long-term solution.
Over time, Mammoth co-founder Bart Decrem says he hopes to pair this human curation with more automated curating, even post by post, with the help of AI. âI would be sort of astonished if we werenât using AI to help organize and make smart lists,â he says. But heâs also aware that AI begets more AI, and he doesnât want to bring in bots trying to game the system or incentivize people to flood their posts with hashtags. âI think what Mastodon should stand for is: in a world full of stuff that you donât know where it came from, I know where this came from.â
Decrem says one of Mammothâs goals continues to be making it easier to get started on Mastodon. The default process has improved over time, but itâs still a lot of work to pick a server, sign up, find people, and get your timeline tuned just the way you like. Itâs too much for some people. âYou need to give people interesting content within, like, a minute,â Decrem says. âThey have to be doing interesting stuff with it.â Heâs intrigued by some of the ways Threads surfaces people you donât follow to keep your timeline lively â and then makes it easy to follow those people.
The new app is free, but you can also pay $3 a month or $20 a year for some extra app icons, early access to new stuff, and a voice in Mammothâs product roadmap. Mostly Decrem hopes itâs a way to support the stuff you like: âthe superpower of Mastodon and the fediverse is that itâs a community, right?â In a gesture back to that community, Mammoth is also open-sourcing its app and pledging to be transparent in everything it builds.
Mammoth wonât just be a Mastodon app forever. Decrem is very excited about the possibility of Threads embracing ActivityPub, for instance, and sees lots of ways Mammoth can do better than the Threads algorithm so many users hate. In general, he says he sees the app as a way to explore the entire fediverse, whether itâs on Mastodon or Pixelfed or anywhere else. Mammothâs job is to curate and personalize all those feeds and make sure thereâs always something good to scroll.