Mastodon’s proposal convinces me, but I find its interface horrible. I don’t like the path that Twitter is following, but I don’t quite see clearly how to make the leap to the fediverse. It is an idea that I have heard repeated a lot in recent weeks and it is true that the Mastodon website is anything but simple. With those columns and so many different sections.
Fortunately, today we bring you a solution that we have known and it fits wonderfully with those of us who simply want a clone of Twitter, but decentralized.
Elk, the client for Mastodon that we were looking for. It is in alpha version, but it works perfectly. We recommend that you directly take a look for yourself. The mechanism is very simple. You put the address of the server where you are registered and voilà. We basically have the Twitter interface, but in Mastodon.
Instead of a baby bird or a mammoth, we have a moose. The rest is a very clean and perfectly recognizable interface, with the message box at the top and the settings bar on the left. It is very fluid and adapts to both desktop and mobile.
Better than many Twitter apps. Elk is an open source application, published on Github. This is a Progressive Web App (PWA) and performance right now is outstanding. As soon as we start with it, one wonders to what extent it is in Mastodon or if we are really using a Twitter client.
As says the engineer Marina Aísabeing a web application we can from the mobile ‘Add to the home screen’, to have a direct access icon on the mobile even if it is not a downloaded application.
Easily accessible sections. At Mastodon we have the line of the people we follow, the local line of our server, and the line of the federated spaces. In Elk, the different instances are found one below the other, one click away and perfectly ordered. This helps not to confuse us, since if Mastodon’s base interface has something, it is that it is not always clear from which orbit we are receiving messages.
Search engine, dark mode and even zen mode. It’s not just a pretty interface, we also have a search engine and settings such as dark mode, the ability to hide counters or activate a zen mode, where the sidebar temporarily disappears to give toots full visibility.
Will the apprentice surpass the master? The debate with Mastodon reminds me of Telegram with WhatsApp. I do not rule out that in the future Mastodon will be a much more complete and easier to use platform, but we will continue to visit Twitter because there are many more people there.
The outdated design of Mastodon’s main website until now made me back, but seeing that there are much more complete and modern clients, my daily experience with Mastodon has changed radically.
In Xataka | Thousands of users are jumping from Twitter to Mastodon. There they are encountering unexpected surprises
