Mastodon Access Methods

I recently saw a really interesting post on Mastodon with a poll asking in broad strokes how people access the service. The options were:

• Official app
• Official web page
• 3rd party app
• 3rd party web page

The poll garnered a solid 5,363 votes in 48 hours. The breakdown was:

• Official app: 17.5%
• Official web page: 21.9%
• 3rd party app: 57.4%
• 3rd party web page: 3.3%

It’s worth noting that since the poll was asking about the primary way users access the service, it only allowed for one option to be selected. The numbers were honestly pretty interesting to me.

3rd Party Apps

I’m not at all surprised that the primary method for the majority of people is a 3rd party app. It’s the option I voted for as well, as I typically access Mastodon the most from Ivory on my iPhone and iPad. It’s a strong, professionally done, highly customizable app. The forced subscription model, while not amenable to everyone, does help to ensure the app has some longevity. There are some other really cool apps out there that are simply the hobby project of a single person that could disappear if they get bored, hit the lottery, fall off a cliff, etc. I also appreciate that the Ivory team doesn’t seem to just add features because they can; it seems to me that they consider why. There’s a 3rd party app I’ve used before that is free, open source, and honestly pretty nice… but it adds tons and tons of features that are questionable at best just because they can be added.

Official Web Page

I was a little surprised to see the official web page to be the second most popular option, though it makes sense after a little thinking. If an app is going to be someone’s primary method of accessing the service, it’s likely going to be a 3rd party one. If someone is mostly accessing Mastodon through a laptop, though, then using the official web page makes sense. It’s honestly a good UI, with options for an “advanced” interface that’s reminiscent of TweetDeck and a “normal” interface that’s what you’d expect from any generic microblogging platform. The Local timeline is easy accessible from the advanced UI, though it’s an extra click from the normal UI. I honestly think most people accessing the service from a PC just aren’t going to be bothered enough to bother trying to find a different web app to use beyond the official one.

Official App

The official app garnering 17% of the responses also isn’t a huge surprise. Mobile users are going to be a majority of users in 2024, and a lot of people aren’t going to care enough to look for something different if it’s good enough for them.

I’ve used the official app before, and while it’s decent, I really dislike how much it tries to hide the idea of the Local timeline in Mastodon. I understand that the people making it are most familiar with some of the mega-instances like mastodon.social and mastodon.online, which currently have 267,000 and 24,000 users respectively. I’ve had an account on the latter before, and even with 24k users the local timeline is just too much busy nonsense to be of any use. However, my instance has 145 users. The instance itself has a tech-heavy slant that I’m looking for, and I frequently find the Local timeline to be quite interesting. As a result, I don’t want to lose easy access to it.

Honestly, if I didn’t care as much as I do about the Local timeline on my instance, I’d probably be using the official app, too.

3rd Party Web Page

I expected this option to be low, though I wasn’t quite expecting it to be as low as it is at just over 3%. On the other hand, there aren’t nearly as many 3rd party web interface options as there are mobile apps, and some of the ones I had previously known about were abandoned by their maintainers (circling back to that whole sustainability thing I mentioned with Ivory.) However, this is my second option for accessing the service if I’m not on my phone or tablet, as I really don’t ever use the official web page. I personally use Elk as my main PC interface into Mastodon. I really enjoy the customization options so that things can look just the way that I want them. I find the UI for it to be super clean, and I really enjoy using it.

That being said, it’s far from perfect. It’s actively developed, but releases can take some time. There are also bugs since the project is currently in alpha. This is something prominently noted by the team on their previously linked GitHub page:

It is already quite usable, but it isn’t ready for wide adoption yet. We recommend you use it if you would like to help us build it. We appreciate your feedback and contributions. Check out the Open Issues and jump in the action. Join the Elk discord server to chat with us and learn more about the project.

Elk developers

While I’ve run into a few bugs, it’s been nothing catastrophic; in fact, it hasn’t even been anything significant enough to make me consider not using it. The main issue I’ve seen is that occasionally I’ll stop being informed of new posts, and refreshing the page fixes the problem. It’s a great web client, and I like basically everything about it better than I like the official one. If I knew anything about JavaScript or Vue I’d probably try to help tackle some of the open issues. As it stands, I’ll just keep using it and singing the team’s praises.

Of course, all of this is relevant because Mastodon is an open platform with an open API where all of this is possible. 3rd party developers are encouraged to make their own apps and interfaces because no one is trying to drive traffic to a central place for the purposes of advertising and data scraping like on some… other microblogging sites. It’s certainly not something to take for granted, so be sure to support the platform developers and your instance maintainers if you have the means!