Elk (Mastodon App)

★★★★☆

An alternate web front-end for Mastodon and compatible servers. A bit more user friendly than Mastodon’s web interface, but ever so slightly buggier, especially on those non-Mastodon servers. Like Phanpy and Pinafore, it runs in your browser and talks to your server so you’re not sending data. It’s a little more cluttered than Phanpy, but only because it shows you more.

Elk works well as a front-end to GoToSocial except for a minor bugs. First, it gets out of sync easily. It’ll tell me I have a notification, but when I look, it’s not there, and I have to reload the page.

(There’s also a rare bug, possibly GTS specific, where Elk will desync between what’s visible and where a click registers. I’ll try to click on “Load more” and it will register an action on a post instead. I haven’t narrowed down when it happens, but I haven’t seen it in a while, so maybe the issue’s been fixed. This of course means I’ll see it again as soon as I post this.)

The biggest problem I have with Elk is that its own support for parsing Markdown in posts to format them interacts badly with servers that parse Markdown themselves. Sometimes it converts characters it shouldn’t, and it alwasys loses inline links when editing. On more than one occasion I’ve had to add links back manually, and on more than one occasion I’ve canceled the edit and switched to another front-end that doesn’t try to second-guess the post format.