Until recently, I’ve been using Mastodon via the web-app on my phone. And credit to the Mastodon developers for making a pretty decent progressive web-app. But all this talk about Ivory has given me, an Android phone owner, a bit of FOMO so I though I’d look for a native client.
I first gave the official Mastodon client a try. And yeah, it works. The login flow was pretty seamless. But there were a few things about it that I didn’t like.
For one, there was no obvious way to look at posts on the local instance. This is something I occasionally do, just to see what’s happening on the instance. I probably only get value for this because my instance is social.lol, which is comparatively small and requires payment to join. For those on instances like mastodon.social, this may be less useful.
But aside from that, there are also some layout issues as well. One that annoyed me was that some posts took up a large amount of space for no apparent reason, almost like there should’ve been an image:
So the official client was out, and after asking for recommendations on the Hemispheric View Discord, I gave Tusky a try. And so far I really like it. It’s got a dedicated tab for posts on the local instance and the UI itself is pretty nice. It reminds me a little of the official Twitter app (make of that what you will).
So far I’ve only used it to browse the timeline. I haven’t had a deep enough look at the features like posting, replying, or muting, so I can’t say if it’s works in that respect. But I think I’ll stick with Tusky for the time being.