mastodon-android VS Tusky

Mastodon app is built like that, the release apk is around 3 Mb, ~half of which is resources: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android

Though it's not without compromises — because of Google's stupid policy that "nothing goes into the system unless it needs direct access to privileged or private system components", RecyclerView, ViewPager, and some other basic UI components are still AndroidX libraries that depend on AppCompat for no good reason. I had to fork them to rid them of that dependency: https://github.com/grishka/LiteX

You should file an issue https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android

Mastodon (version 45): Decentralized social network

I love that Mastodon is decentralized. But as a privacy engineer, I was curious about how their app handles our data compared to what they claim in their privacy policy, so I analyzed their open-source app code in my privacy code scanning tool.

We tried to analyze if the actual application code (which is open-source) actually adheres to the privacy policy as declared by mastodon.social server. Therefore, we ran the Privado privacy scanner on Mastodon’s Android application code.

this was fixed yesterday, see this issue in the bugtracker: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/issues/298

Tusky (version 24.0): A multi account client for the social network Mastodon

For Android, one option is Tusky.

Mastodon itself doesn't, but maybe he's referring to Tusky, a popular FOSS Mastodon client, preventing its users from logging in with an account tied to an alt-right instance (gab and a few others I think).

They used to also filter any content coming from these accounts but I can't it in the code so they must have removed that.

As for the login block itself it's there: https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/blob/01b3cb3a53b1e08ed26e7...

Tusky manages multiple accounts.

You can't in the official app, but you can see them in moshidon, megalodon and tusky. Moshidon and megalodon are both forks of the official app with more features. You should try them out :D

Tusky (version 20.0): A multi account client for the social network Mastodon

I signed onto Fosstodon last week to give Mastodon another try. I found the overall experience to be massively improved (last time I touched it was in 2017) and the recent traction it has gotten puts it well ahead of anything else IMO (I'm also testing out Farcaster and a few other services, but those seem pretty niche/immature in comparison).

While Mastodon is a bit rough around the edges, it has that same sort of excitement to me when I signed onto Twitter back in 2006, and most of those same friends/connections from those early days have been migrating. Based on the numbers floating around, I think it has enough traction now/critical mass to be it's own pretty exciting thing. While a lot of instances will fail, I don't think economic sustainability is actually a showstopper. Patreon, OpenCollective, any number of tools can handle recurrent donations enough to sustain larger instances, and there probably will be some alternative approaches as well. Migrating accounts between Mastodon instances isn't perfect, but is a core built-in feature, so while there's a bit of instance roulette, I don't think it's such a big deal. There are tools like https://fediverse.observer/ that might help for picking. It even has a map view, which is pretty neat: https://fediverse.observer/map

Here's a rough view of ActivityPub growth: https://fediverse.observer/stats

FWIW, I decided early on as I started researching into the current state of the Fediverse/ActivityPub that I should probably run my own instance. There are hosting providers that provide Mastodon hosting (although most of them like Spacebear and Mastohost are oversubscribed), but as I was researching, I decided something like Pleroma or Missykey would be a better fit anyway. There are some forks and I ended up using a fork of Pleroma, Akkoma (since, while a bit involved, it has pretty decent docs for setting up w/ Docker Compose and overall seems like the best-performing of the bunch, and has good support for most Mastodon clients). I was able to repoint my account from the Fosstodon Mastodon instance (which included migrating my followers!) to my new personal Akkoma instance pretty easily (the only wrinkle was setting up webfinger since I decided I wanted my canonical account id to not be a subdomain).

For those looking for a bit of an overview of what the current "Fediverse" landscape looks like, some resources that helped me get started:

* https://fediverse.party/

* https://joinfediverse.wiki/Main_Page

* https://www.paritybit.ca/blog/mastodon-is-dead-long-live-mis...

For clients btw, I'm using Whalebird https://whalebird.social/ and Sengi https://nicolasconstant.github.io/sengi/ on desktop, and Tusky https://tusky.app/ on mobile.

The official app is pretty good and cross-platform. I use Tusky on Android, and really like it. A couple of other tech instances are