Ivory is a fantastic UI for Mastodon. Mastodon's only big hiccup really is the confusion around picking an instance. But that will go away once a few "normie" instances get a foothold and serve as a kind of "America Online" for the Fediverse.
Secondarily the fact that it doesn't tune for engagement means casual users will tend to bounce off of it (since there is nothing to sink them in and keep them coming back). But to many that's a feature rather than a bug. Akin to losing smokers by banning smoking in bars.
I don't use Mastodon (nor Twitter, nor Bluesky, etc.), but if that sort of thing did appeal to me, Mastodon would be the only one that would be acceptable precisely because it doesn't tune for engagement.
"Tuning for engagement" and/or using the usual "stickiness" tricks is a huge red flag to me.
for Mastodon being key here because they still haven't made it able to correctly talk to non-Mastodon instances (I'm convinced[1] this is because they've used `int64` for their status IDs despite the spec saying don't.)
[1] My Akkoma instance shows no posts - status IDs are opaque, non-`atoi`-able strings. My GotoSocial instance shows many posts but they are all the same post - status IDs all currently being with `01` which would explain the presence of posts and all being the same. In summary, stupid.
Mastodon has hugely improved my user experience by being open to third-party apps like Ivory, which is amazing (and much better than Bluesky.) For people who want algorithmic content, presumably third party services could handle that problem as well… except that the Mastodon community has been pretty opinionated about not allowing content search an aggregation at a project and instance level. This sort of from-the-top hostility makes that kind of extension into a risky project.
Ivory is a fantastic UI for Mastodon. Mastodon's only big hiccup really is the confusion around picking an instance. But that will go away once a few "normie" instances get a foothold and serve as a kind of "America Online" for the Fediverse.
Secondarily the fact that it doesn't tune for engagement means casual users will tend to bounce off of it (since there is nothing to sink them in and keep them coming back). But to many that's a feature rather than a bug. Akin to losing smokers by banning smoking in bars.