Roughly one year ago, Elon Musk's Twitter (now known as X) abruptly stopped working with third-party apps. There was no immediate communication, and the chaotic environment under Musk made some folks wonder if it was all just a mistake. Sadly, that wasn't the case.

Twitter eventually laid out new onerous terms for third-party use, so beloved long-running clients closed up shop. Tapbot, the makers of Tweetbot, quickly moved over to developing the Ivory client for the ActivityPub-based Mastodon platform, but Iconfactory, the folks behind Twitterrific, took a lot longer to shift direction. Finally, we know what they're up to now that the Twitter dream is dead.

At the tail end of January, Iconfactory announced a brand new Kickstarter campaign for a new app titled "Project Tapestry." This isn't really a social media client directly in the mold of Twitterrific; instead, it's a single place to view online stuff that matters, and it mostly uses open standards like ActivityPub and RSS. Luckily for them, they've already reached their $100,000 minimum funding goal.

Fascinated by this move, we reached out to Iconfactory, and got to speak to Ged Maheux, its co-founder and the principal designer for Project Tapestry. Enjoy our lengthy conversation below.

A chat with Ged Maheux of Iconfactory

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Digg: What is Project Tapestry in a nutshell, and what is the ambition for it now that the funding goal has been surpassed?

Ged Maheux: Tapestry is an attempt to try and bring the ever-widening array of social media, blog, data source and other destinations on the internet that users track on a day-to-day basis and present them in a unified, chronological timeline. Since Twitter's decline, and the bricking up of the service into a walled garden, a number of social media services have evolved to fill the void including Threads and Bluesky. Tapestry aims to give users the ability to follow people and information from these and other sources in a single, manageable place.

The goal for Tapestry now is to try and reach as many stretch goals as we can so we can build in more robust features into the app, and hopefully also build a native version for macOS. That would be our ultimate dream — hopefully we'll get there, but there are other great features like muting, muffling, a browsable database of feed sources and more we also want to bring to the app.

^{Image: Pixabay, Pexels}

Digg: Why choose crowdfunding in this moment, and why Kickstarter particularly?

Ged: We funded another one of our efforts, Twitterrific for macOS with Kickstarter successfully back in 2017, and wanted to try it again. We're a small indie developer and don't want to try and raise venture capitol for our app. We want to keep control of its development, guide its features and let our backers on Kickstarter give suggestions on features and overall direction. By allowing the project to be crowdfunded, we can do all of these things and more. The fact that it reached 100 percent funding in a mere four days proved that the idea resonated with our user base. We couldn't be more pleased. Hopefully we can reach at least one stretch goal as well.

Digg: Can you briefly explain how you and your team felt about Twitter's unceremonious assassination of third-party clients? How has that impacted how you and your company view software development going forward?

Ged: It was a very challenging time for everyone involved. We had developed a working relationship with the folks at Twitter over the course of more than a decade, and through it all, we worked with them to stay within design and API guidelines for many, many years. Then, suddenly and without warning, our access and access for our customers was unceremoniously cut off. Overnight, our entire user base was unable to access Twitter via Twitterrific, and there was no way to communicate with Twitter, no way to appeal the decision and no way to ween our users off the service. If we had been given at least a couple of weeks' notice things might have gone differently, but that's not what happened and so we were left in the lurch and on the hook to refund customers who had purchased annual subscriptions for Twitterrific in the App Store. That still stings to this day.

Twitterrific was our flagship app, and by far earned the most of any of our pieces of software we’ve produced. Its loss is still being felt revenue-wise to this day. We're hopeful that Tapestry will help us regain some of that ground and help us keep our company healthy, doing the things we love to do — developing great, friendly and useful apps for iOS and macOS.

^{Image: George Dolgikh, Pexels}

Digg: This project is focused on open standards like ActivityPub and RSS — sources that billionaires can't destroy out of spite. Can you explain how important that is to you as a developer, and how you view that in the context of the modern web?

Ged: I think the entire tech community has evolved in this space over the course of the past few years to discover the importance of open standards and escaping the walled gardens of old. Looking back, it was a mistake to pin so much of our effort on an API that was owned by a single company. That stung us in the end, and [that's] why we all made the decision to move to Mastodon as our social network going forward. The open, non-centralized version of Mastodon is quite refreshing, and while many challenges still exist there, it has the momentum and community to not only deal with them but to solve them in the long run.

Tapestry is based around RSS and the open web and since there will be no "account" to set up, your sources will live on your individual device. Your unified timeline will be your own business with no algorithm feeding you what we think you should see or be interacting with. This is the most exciting part, along with the DIY nature of the API we're developing so that coders can build their own connections to the app to present the kind of niche data sources that the internet is famous for. We're really hoping it will take off.

Digg: On the Kickstarter page, it says that "Tapestry isn't meant to replace your favorite Mastodon app or RSS reader, but rather to complement them and help you figure out where you want to focus your attention." Does this reflect how your relationship with the internet and social media has changed? Is "focus" the differentiation for your app?

Ged: Much has changed over the last decade, including a wider, stronger choice when it comes to compelling software on the App Store. The store is replete with wonderful apps to browse and interact with [on] Mastodon for example. We don't have a desire to try and compete with those great apps, we'd rather offer something new. A hub of sorts that becomes your central destination to help keep track of what you've looked at and what you want to focus on. When it comes time to interact with a particular post, you'll be able to tap a button and open it in your Mastodon or RSS app of choice if desired, and do all the things you would expect to do. This is a different approach than others have tried in the past, and one we're anxious to explore once we get past the funding portion of our Kickstarter.

^{Image: Andrea Piacquadio, Pexels}

Digg: Iconfactory has an extremely long history developing for Apple's operating systems, but I'd like to know how being beholden to Apple to a certain extent mirrors being beholden to Twitter? Does it feel different meaningfully?

Ged: That's a great question! The primary way these two entities are different is their respective approach to developers. Twitter always had a semi-adversarial relationship with third party developers. Depending on who was at the helm, the company would waffle between supporting devs and then throttling them, and ultimately treating them as if they didn't exist. In contrast, Apple has always embraced third party developers, nurtured them and done what they can to foster a great relationship with them. We might not always agree on their policies or their directions as a company, but at least they communicated why they were doing the things they were doing. Twitter rarely did this, and in the end didn't communicate at all with third party devs. They just cut them off. It's a fundamentally different philosophy stemming directly from who was in control at Twitter when this happened, I feel.

Digg: Are there any other aspects of software development, or this project in particular, that you think people should know about?

Ged: Just that we've been doing what we've been doing now for over 25 years. We're not some fly-by-night app shop. We have a long history of making great apps that people love, and have even won an Apple Design Award doing it. It's important for people to know we're passionate about what we do, it's our true love, and hopefully that comes through in everything we do, be it in the software, or how we present ourselves to the world and in interviews like this. We really hope people will back our efforts with Tapestry on Kickstarter, check out our other apps, and foster indie software companies like ours well into the future.

Thanks!

[Image: Kristina Paukshtite, Pexels]