Phanpy (Mastodon App)

★★★★★

Phanpy is described as “A minimalistic opinionated Mastodon web client.” Minimalistic in the sense that it’s not cluttered, opinionated in the sense that it has a strong design philosophy, and web client in the sense that you load the app at the website and then log into your server from there. (It runs entirely in your browser, so the Phanpy server never gets access to your account.) It’s optimized for mobile and runs well on desktops too.

Design

It’s a single-column view like the regular Mastodon web view, but it’s easier on the eyes and more comfortable to use.

Interaction buttons are hidden in the timeline to encourage you to actually think about what you’re doing before you boost, like, or reply. This can sometimes be annoying, especially when I’m trying to get the like button for a particular post in a thread.

Plus it has some nice features like “Catch-up,” which shows you a sortable list of posts within the last hour (adjustable up to 12 hours) and doesn’t scroll infinitely, so you can feel like you’re done.

The “boost carousel” pulls boosts out of the main timeline and puts them in a horizontally-scrolling list. It’s a way to keep posts from people who boost a lot from filling up your timeline, and emphasize the posts from people you follow directly. It messes with my sense of where I left off a bit, but it works well on my phone where I can swipe through posts quickly. On a desktop, where I’m using a mouse, it’s still frustrating, and after a month or so I finally just turned it off. (At least it doesn’t auto-rotate.)

Compatibility

I’ve found it to be reliable with both Mastodon and GoToSocial accounts, and I’d expect it to work with any other Fediverse servers that support the Mastodon API. It displays formatted posts, but doesn’t try to interpret or compose Markdown itself like Elk does. This makes Phanpy more reliable than Elk with GoToSocial if you’ve enabled Markdown for your posts, since you don’t have two Markdown parsers fighting each other!

The latest version of the app is always at phanpy.social, but you can also run your own copy of it. It works well on desktops, mobile, and installed as a mobile web app, though I still prefer Tusky on Android.