Life without Twitter: this app brings together your feeds from Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon

To mark my farewell to Twitter (I'm tired of calling it X), I thought I'd start with a nostalgic look back at my first tweets from 2007 – a time when it was common for people to post that they were having breakfast or going to bed. I was even going to put links to some of these posts, but the advanced search is down at the moment – ​​which, in a way, is even better.

Honestly, I gave Elon Musk every chance possible and even more. When he decided to buy Twitter, I struggled to keep an open mind. Even after I realized he was destroying the platform, I stayed there because of the many good people who still resisted.

But when Donald Trump mentioned Musk in his election night victory speech, it was too much for me. Not only did he allow hate and misinformation to spread on Twitter, he also turned his own account into one of the main channels for it.

Musk is an adult and, if he wants to act irresponsibly, that's his right. But instead of continuing to participate in this dystopia, I decided to leave. And I saw other people I admire doing the same. People have been talking about the end of Twitter for over a decade, but this time it really is dead – at least for me.

However, leaving the platform for good forced me to face something I had been avoiding. I already had accounts on Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, but managing them all – in addition to the time I spent on Twitter – was exhausting. So, I left these networks aside, used them sporadically, but rarely felt like I belonged to them.

What I really wanted was an app like Trillianwhich united Twitter-style social networks in one place (and, ironically, did not need to include Twitter itself – now, being left out is more of a positive than a problem).

The app has interesting features, such as the ability to see popular posts from accounts you follow.

I knew some platforms that offered something in this sense – however, in a limited way –, such as croissaint (which only allows you to publish on social media) and Tapestry (which only shows posts).

But it was only when a Bluesky user mentioned the Openvibe I found exactly what I was looking for: a free app for iPhone, Android, iPad and Mac that really brings together multiple networks.

And look, I loved it. Here, you can log into your Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads accounts and post to all of them at the same time. It also combines into a single feed all posts from accounts you follow.

For technical reasons, Openvibe is still unable to display Threads posts in this feedbut you can read user responses and comment on them. It also supports Nostr, an open protocol for Twitter-style social networking, which is not yet that popular.

No social network alone should be able to bring back that Twitter spirit that Musk so quickly destroyed. But Openvibe combines multiple networks in a way that comes surprisingly close.

The app is well-made and pleasant to use, and it has cool features like the ability to see popular posts from accounts you follow. In less than a week of using Openvibe, I already feel more engaged with Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, and the nostalgia I still felt for the old Twitter disappeared much faster than I expected.

If you only use one of these networks as your main one, you may not need this app. But, if, like me, you like to switch between them, it's worth trying. Creating emotional attachment to a social network that could end at any moment is a mistake that, this time, I do not intend to repeat.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Harry McCracken is Fast Company's technology editor based in San Francisco. In past lives, he was editor of Time, founder and editor… find out more

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