A new app called Tapestry promising to unify social media, news, and RSS in one place, is nearing completion. Designed by Iconfactory, the same team that created the third-party Twitter client Twitterific back in the day, Tapestry was unveiled at the beginning of the year as a tool that could better organize today's fragmented online media, allowing users to track their favorite blogs, news sites, and social networks from a single app. This week, the company announced an update on Tapestry's progress, saying that it planned to officially launch the app to the public in "early 2025."
"Obviously the sooner the better, but there's still some important work to be done and bugs to be squashed," the update on the project's Patreon page noted.
Instead of raising from outside investors, Iconfactory has been crowdfunding Tapestry's development. To date, over 3360 backers pledged north of $177,800 to bring the app to life.
The app will appeal to people who are tired of trying to keep up with multiple sites, blogs, and social media services by constantly opening new browser tabs and switching apps. It also capitalizes users being frustrated that there are now too many Twitter clones.
Following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, now called X, there has been an explosion of interest in new Twitter-like services, including apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, built on open protocols, and Meta's Threads, which is working to integrate with ActivityPub, the same protocol powering Mastodon. (Other smaller apps like T2/Pebble, Post, and Cohost, have since shut down.)
As a result of these experiments in a more open social web, there's potential for new user experiences designed to browse these different services, app developers believe.
Just this week Flipboard launched its own take on what a browser for the open web should look like, with the launch of an app called Surf that lets you track RSS, Bluesky, and Mastodon content in a single app.
It's not the only company thinking about this.
Besides Iconfactory, the developer behind the popular Mac and iOS newsreader Reeder, Silvio Rizzi, reinvented his app to expand beyond RSS to include support for other social services, like Mastodon, Bluesky, YouTube, Reddit, and others. Another indie app called Feeeed also expanded this year to allow users to track RSS, newsletters, Mastodon, Tumblr, Reddit, and others. And this week, Feeeed added support for Bluesky, too. Plus, an app called Openvibe lets you browse Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads in one place.