When Mastodons Tweet in the Bluesky

People run at rocket-speed away from X, in all directions - but Openvibe may be able to gather people again. Does it work?

I wonder if Elon Musk is aware of the effect his purchase of Twitter and his behaviour afterwards has had on the microblog market?

Several alternatives have appeared, including both Mastodon and Threads, which may be the two most spoken about, but also Bluesky and Nostr. All of them basically modelled after Twitter, but with two major differences:

1. They are decentralised, not operated by just one owner who, like Musk, can change everything at will

2. People behave — speak more nicely to each other and leave out all the hate speech and one-eyed politics

In the youth of social media, it wasn’t a problem to have many different platforms. Each of them could proudly announce how they had reached 100k users, or a million. Google attempted its way into this too with Google+, and even they were happy to have just a few million registered users — for a while, until they gave up.

Today, everything must be counted in 8 or 9 digits or more, and with several competing platforms that all look almost identical and contain almost identical contents, posted by almost identical users… Well, in such a situation, none of them can gain a real momentum in the competition against X, the new name for Twitter.

Enter Openvibe.

A new app, brilliantly constructed to combine the efforts of all the above-mentioned platforms (not X, though) into just one and the same app, allowing for a post to be distributed on all the four platforms. Voilà! No more considerations about which of the platforms to focus on, no more quartering your time between all of them: you can, with a tap by your finger, service your audiences on all platforms simultaneously.

More platforms are on the way. Perhaps one day also Substack Notes?

And just to get it clear - it is an app for mobile phones. These days it means two versions, one for iPhone/iPad and another for Android, available by following the links at the bottom of openvibe.social. That’s it — no web app. However, on a Mac, it is possible to install the iPad version, which appears as an option when trying to install the iPhone version from the Openvibe website (using Apple’s App Store). I believe that it is possible to install the Android version on a Windows 11 computer, but I haven’t tried it.

I installed Openvibe on both my Mac and my iPhone, and each of them turned out to require a full setup — there is no login to Openvibe, so one installation cannot know what you have set up in another. But since the setup consists of logging in to each of the social networks you want to use with Openvibe, it is quickly done.

For me, the hardest part was to remember which network my Mastodon account belonged to — and in that process, I found out that I had two, on separate networks. I never use them, so I had forgotten! Other social media platforms to choose from are Bluesky, Nostr, and Threads.

Bluesky easily logged in by itself, as I was already logged in on both devices, while Threads didn’t work — I could not log in from Openvibe and got an error message about needing an active account. I have an active account, but Threads-support is in beta testing, so this problem could possibly be because it is all new and error-prone. As I didn’t have a Nostr-account, Openvibe offered me to create one with a simple tap/click on a button, just having to tell which username and password I wanted.

The next that happened was that I saw a stream of news, the main screen of the app, just like in each of the services’ own apps, only with a small difference: Next to each post is a small badge, telling from which platform the post has been gathered.

I tried immediately to send a post, and it turned out to be quite flexible: Above the editing screen is a small symbol showing a split-road, and tapping it displays a selection box for selecting or deselecting each of the connected platforms. As default, they are all selected, which means that the post will be sent to all platforms. If you just type the message and tap the Post-button, this is what will happen. I did, and a fraction of a second later, my post was out on all three platforms.

So, to sum it all up: Openvibe is simply a shell app that enters the APIs of each of the supported platforms and displays all posts gathered in one, combined stream. When sending, it can send to one, several, or all of the connected platforms. And that’s it! You still need to have an account on each platform, and you do not gain any additional features of any kind — just the possibility to talk to several platforms at the same time.

I find Openvibe useful in all its simplicity and cannot see why I shouldn’t use this instead of the individual apps. But it is important to notice that a reply, like, or other interaction with your post on one of the networks will not automatically be distributed to the others. So your friends on Bluesky will not know that your friends on Mastodon love your post and have liked it a thousand times.

I haven’t yet been engaged in discussions, but I could imagine that if it takes place across several platforms, people might get confused from seeing only the comments given on their own platform — together with your replies to invisible comments from other platforms.

The integration of the different social media exists only in your installation of the Openvibe app. It is your personal integration. But, of course, if everybody decides to use Openvibe for all their microblog communication, and they all have accounts on all microblog social media, and all have the same followers on all of them… You get my point? It is a nice idea, but we will never get to such a coordinated effort from every person on the planet, so it will never work 100%.

But I love collaboration and communication across borders — and here is a possibility for you to cross several borders in one go, without any efforts. I would say: go for it!

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Postscript

Having tried out a bit more, I can see that the proposed confusion of readers and commenters not seeing everything will not happen — the reason being that each post you send will be separate for each of the social media sent to. Openvibe doesn’t try to integrate them into one thread.

Because of this, I now, with my three connected social media accounts, need to maintain a discussion for each of them separately after posting.

This makes the concept easier to grasp, easier to maintain for the programmers, but also a bit less advantageous.

If you have knowledge of any way of combining the threads on the different platforms into one, please tell about it!