Very excited about Project Tapestry from the Iconfactory, now available to back on Kickstarter. We need more apps for the social web like this that work across multiple platforms. It will support Micro.blog too!
@SimonWoods lol! You’re only allowed to connect with others if you own an Apple device was my thought here hahaha. Hope this will drive other apps to do the same.
@vincent I love the small and independent Mac developers, truly, however each of them are increasingly becoming primarily yet another iPhone developer... and maybe next it'll be Apple goggles developer idk...
I get it, it's the world and you have to be pragmatic. I'm just sad because I've yet to find any proof that Apple will ever care about the independence of the web. I previously spoke about Apple's hostility to the web in the Slack for Core Intuition and was immediately met with firm disagreement; to be frank, I take Apple's latest round of nonsense as proof that I was correct.
@SimonWoods they only care about the money. It’s in their DNA 🤣 Open web doesn’t equal money.
For me it’s that they blatantly just lie and hide behind “safety”. My eyes roll so hard at that talk that it hurts 😋
As an aside: I hope the Icon Factory consider a web app at least. That’s the best “open web” thing they can do.
@manton Thanks for pointing it out! I’m gonna hold out for a web app, even if only by subscription, but it’s a necessary and needed idea, and maybe it will spur others to fill this niche.
@vincent @SimonWoods It's a strange decision for a company (Iconfactory) that was so recently damaged by having the rug pulled out from under them by Twitter to put all their eggs back in someone else's basket (Apple).
@manton What do you think about this: “As for features, Tapestry will not be able to reply to or create posts on its own.” This kills it for me
@hyper It's a limitation for sure, but let's see how it plays out. Some form of posting would be a natural addition after 1.0.
@vincent @SimonWoods With a new product, you have to pick your battles. The easiest win for us is iOS/iPadOS. We want to support other platforms, but they will come later. You're absolutely right that it's about the money, because without it, we're out of business (that's not hyperbole, unfortunately).
Also, we've looked at the possibility of a web app. Each data source has it's own JavaScript context (like each tab in a web browser) and the web app that people would want would put all content in a single HTML document. We're making heavy use of JavaScript's sandbox to make sure data sources remain secure and unable to leak data, and that's just not possible if all data sources are in the same sandbox. Safety is not a lie.
It's not clear if there's a way to accomplish the web app goal, which is kind of ironic considering how much we're leveraging web infrastructure in this project.
@hyper Once you have all your feeds in one place, cross posting gets kind of annoying because you see someone say the same thing on Micro.blog, Mastodon, and Bluesky. And you don't really known which of those is their preferred network (or in some cases you may not be able to reply).
It also gets complicated when you start to think about what you're posting. For example, Bluesky can't do video (Mastodon can), Micro.blog can use HTML (Mastodon can't), all services have different posting lengths, etc. It's a confusing matrix that's really hard to surface in a user interface. For example, a Post button getting disabled as soon as you add a video to a post because one of the destinations is Bluesky. Or text getting truncated on some services without you knowing it.
We actually prototyped the ability to post and backed away from it because of these complications. It may make a reappearance as the product matures, but it's not something we feel comfortable promising now.
@chockenberry Hey Craig. For what it’s worth, and I apologise if it seems this was a dig at Tapestry — which it wasn’t and isn’t — @SimonWoods and I were talking about Apple (the company) and not you or anything you make at Iconfactory.
The apps you create are top class and inspirational. Totally understand that your strengths lie in iOS and the Apple universe — no denying that.
I did bring up the web app because of reasons you mentioned, because I am excited about an open web. And an open web doesn’t care too much about what platform you run on (not digging here at all).
Tapestry will be an amazing product, and I love to watch this take shape now. I was a backer in the day with Twitterific.
✌️❤️
@chockenberry I wonder if you can expand upon the security risks of the data sources sharing the same context? Is it a concern about something in the app accidentally leaking data across sources or something about the sources themselves?
@dfj It could be accidental or intentional. Say one plug-in retrieves a bunch of stuff from your Mastodon timeline, including private mentions. Then another plug-in has access to the array of data where those posts are kept (because they live in the same JavaScript context) and decides it wants to post them to a server somewhere without you knowing.
That would be bad. And easy to do.
@chockenberry Thank you for the additional context. This makes a lot of sense to me, especially if/when 3rd parties are providing those JavaScript plug-ins.