Image Credit: Mammoth
Mammoth is a new Mastodon app available for free on the App Store for iOS devices. In its first few days, it has already garnered over 10,000 downloads. The team behind Mammoth includes the developer of Aviary, a Twitter app that was discontinued earlier this year after Twitter owner Elon Musk decided that third-party Twitter clients were no longer necessary.
Mammoth was developed in response to Musk's decision and is part of a trend of app developers turning to Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter. Another popular Twitter client, Tweetbot, also launched a Mastodon app called Ivory last month.
Unlike Ivory, Mammoth is free without any in-app purchases, at least for now. The company plans to offer a subscription version of Mammoth and its community, moth.social, in the future, but has not yet decided on the details. Its immediate goal is to encourage Mastodon adoption and contribute to reaching 10 million and eventually 100 million active users.
Mammoth offers a range of features, including browsing and switching between Mastodon timelines, posting content such as text, images, GIFs, and polls, using private messages, lists, and bookmarks, changing the app icon and theme, turning on dark mode, accessing multiple accounts, and undoing posts with a custom duration, similar to Twitter. The app also includes thread creation tools, picture-in-picture for pinning posts to your screen, tools for viewing media in AR, tools for sentiment analysis, the ability to hide replies, translation tools while in compose, and more. The app will soon be available on macOS as well.
What sets Mammoth apart from other Mastodon apps is its approach to user onboarding. Choosing a server is often a difficult part of the setup process, but it is necessary for participation in Mastodon and the broader group of interconnected servers known as the Fediverse. To make this process easier, Mammoth presents a simplified user interface that walks users through the account setup process and suggests users to follow across categories.
Mammoth is optimistic about the potential of the Fediverse and decentralized internet in general. The company plans to make Mastodon easier for the next 10 million users and ultimately the next 100 million. It aims to achieve this goal by open-sourcing its code and operating its own instance. While it is an ambitious goal, Mammoth believes that decentralized apps have the potential to carve out a niche amid the shadow of tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook.
0 Comments