Fediverse to go

Social media lives in the palm of your hand.

To run a successful social media empire, you need a service that looks good on the go, and allows users to access their feed in comfort and doom scroll on the train, in class or while on a first date in a fancy restaurant.

Fortunately, there are official and unofficial mobile solutions of variable quality for all five of our candidate instance types. The ActivityPub protocol is standard for all fediverse instances, so in theory, every mobile client should work with every server type.

Mastodon, as the largest and best known name, has its own branded app, featuring dark mode, polls and a collection of cute elephant mascots. It’s fine, we guess, and great for scrolling chronologically through posts by people you follow on your home server and elsewhere. For new users in search of servers, you can search through available instances and filter by type – or type in your own server address. If you want the fediverse to feel friendly, non-threatening and familiar, this is the one to go for.

Neither Akkoma nor Misskey have their own dedicated mobile apps, but they’re 100% compatible with either the Mastodon mobile app or one of the generic fediverse clients you can download from F-Droid or a proprietary marketplace. Of these, our favourite is Tusky, thanks to its ability to follow hashtags, schedule posts, and make announcements, and its superior timeline controls.

Pixelfed’s app – as you might imagine – prioritises streams of images and hashtags à la Instagram, and while more limited for discussions, is extremely good.

If you’ve ever used Reddit, you’ll be at home with Lemmy’s semi-official Jerboa app.