OpenVibe

★★★☆☆

It’s a cool idea! Combine all your social networking feeds into a single app. Respond to posts and let the app choose the appropriate account. Cross-post easily. And I really like the typeface)!

My key takeaway is that to use it, you have to either be following a small enough number of people across services, or you need to be OK with not catching everything. (You kind of do anyway, but this takes all your sources and mixes them into the same firehose.)

Currently, it supports one each of Mastodon (and compatible servers including GoToSocial), Bluesky, Nostr, and Threads, plus RSS/Atom feeds and plans to add Tumblr. You can also set up multiple profiles, but each can only have one account of each type. That means if you have two Mastodon accounts and a Bluesky account, you can’t set them all up on the same profile.

Feeding Issues

RSS support finally launched last week, which is why I picked up the app again. Again, I do like the idea of being able to just follow websites instead of following a social media account that follows the website! It auto-detects feeds correctly, so you only need to enter the main website to subscribe to its feed. On your timeline it’ll show the title and summary, and tapping on it opens the article in a reader mode without all the extra clutter. The article view also has a button to just show the actual web page.

Downsides: If you’re following an site in a social context, you can’t comment, and if you’re following one in a news context, it gets lost in the shuffle.

Also, it doesn’t seem to do use the content of a full-text feed. It always loads the web page and then strips out what it thinks is unneeded. I can use Nextcloud News seamlessly in airplane mode. That’s not the case with OpenVibe, which will just sit there with a blank screen, trying to download.

And it’s been sending me snarky “reminders” to just add an RSS feed, already, even though I already have. I am not a fan of communication apps that send me promotional notifications.

Context Troubles

Unfortunately, it’s a whole new layer of context collapse, with the added bonus that the contexts get pulled apart too. Making a single cross-post is easy, but you’re stuck with the shorter size limit, and it doesn’t remember that the Bluesky and Mastodon versions are the same post. You still have to do followups manually, once per network. (Sure, you have to do that when you’re using separate apps too, but at least you expect to be able to do that, because the context you’re using it in is different.)

The biggest problem for me is that I’m already following too many people on the Fediverse to keep track without using lists. Bluesky accounts just get lost in the shuffle. What I’d really like to be able to do with this kind of combined app would be to combine custom timelines across accounts. Make a list for Science Talk and include people on both Bluesky and the Fediverse, that sort of thing. But that doesn’t seem to be the kind of app they’re trying to build, at least not so far.

Well, that and the fact that the “Following” tab keeps getting stuck, but that seems to only be a problem with GoToSocial, not Mastodon. Either that or I really am following too many people!