Fread

★★★★☆

At first glance Fread looks like OpenVibe, because you can log into Bluesky and Mastodon-compatible services, plus follow RSS/Atom feeds. But it doesn’t try to merge them into a single timeline (yet?), and lets you add as many of any type as you want instead of limiting you to one of each type. It acts just like any other Fediverse app that lets you sign into multiple accounts. And it has the open-this-post-in-another-account feature I first saw in Tusky.

You can also assemble custom timelines, not tied to an account, made up of public feeds of all types, which is pretty cool! It’ll search by username, full feed URL or homepage URLs, though it doesn’t seem to auto-detect feeds. If you have an account on the same server as the one you’re following, it’ll use that one for replies, likes, and boosts.

Another advantage over OpenVibe is that its RSS/Feed support uses the feed content when you tap on the summary, so you can still read a post on a full-text feed if you’ve gone offline. On the downside, it doesn’t seem to auto-detect feeds, at least not if the site you’re trying to add also matches a Bluesky account.

Cross-posting is easy, but it has the same problems as OpenVibe: it’s limited by the account with the shortest text limit, and once the cross-post has been made, there’s no way to follow up on both posts together.

I like the overall look it applies to posts, but it strips out existing formatting (like Mastodon itself used to do), including bold/italic, block quotes, lists, etc. That’s frustrating.

It doesn’t seem to support any features beyond what’s in mainstream Mastodon/Bluesky, and it doesn’t offer features like direct messages (yet) or scheduled posts, but so far it seems to work with GoToSocial, PixelFed, Snac and Sharkey. (It can log into Akkoma, but can’t display the post timeline.)