Tapestry 1.0
Tapestry combines posts from your favorite social media services like Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr and others with RSS feeds, podcasts, YouTube channels and more. All of your content presented in chronological order, with no algorithm deciding what you should or shouldn't see.
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Third-party connectors can be added to Tapestry to allow it to work with even more sources. If it has a publicly-accessible feed on the internet, a connector can be built for it.
Tapestry is a free download on the App Store, with subscription options available to remove ads, unlock custom timelines, content muting, and theme customization. Subscriptions run $1.99/month, $19.99/year, or you can make a one-time purchase of $79.99.
Connectors are created with standard web technologies: JavaScript and JSON. All of Tapestry’s connectors are open source and easy to adapt for your needs.
You’ll use Tapestry Loom on a Mac to test and debug your connector[…]
Centralized systems have shown their weakness and siloed content has as much a chance of surviving as “You’ve got mail!”.
Tapestry was built with this change in mind. Your content comes from a lot of different places, and how that data is retrieved from a feed is entirely customizable. Our goal was to put RSS, social media, podcasts, and more into a flexible and easy-to-read timeline. Tapestry syncs this variety of feeds across devices in a way that is seamless, secure, and easy to understand.
I am not sure I want all of these things inside a single app’s timeline. I typically want to treat reading web feeds as a discrete task, for example, and I would use a dedicated podcast client instead. But I like the idea of a merged social media feed. Some people have accounts on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog, while others are on only one of those services. I would often like to see all of them at the same time.
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What I would really like — and I do not mean to sound ungrateful or demanding — is a MacOS client.
Previously:
Update (2025-02-11): Federico Viticci:
My problem with timeline apps is that I struggle to understand their pitch as alternatives to browsing Mastodon and Bluesky (supported by both Tapestry and Reeder) when they don’t support key functionalities of those services such as posting, replying, reposting, or marking items as favorites.
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But: the beauty of the open web and the approach embraced by Tapestry and Reeder is that there are plenty of potential use cases to satisfy everyone. Crucially, this includes people who are not like me. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here because the web isn’t built like that.
So, while I still haven’t decided which of these two apps I’m going to use yet, I’ve found my own way to take advantage of timeline apps: I like to use them as specialized feeds for timelines that I don’t want to (or can’t) have in my RSS reader or add as lists to Mastodon/Bluesky.
5 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Now wait a minute, I thought between Catalyst and Apple Silicon, we had that whole “no Mac app for this iOS app” thing solved years ago!
I had a lot of hope for that for a short time. But it seems Apple management support for it dried up real fast.
> An item in the timeline must have two things: a URI and a date. The URI is a unique identifier that lets Tapestry manage all the items in your timeline. The URI will usually be a URL, which is a unique location on the Internet. The date is required to present items chronologically.
https://github.com/TheIconfactory/Tapestry/blob/main/Documentation/GettingStarted.md
I'm no expert on this, but would this allow me to pull in content akin to a web scraper?
Or we could just use RSS? I dunno, seems to me that we're thinking too hard about this problem and in the end putting quantity over quality anyway. Maybe all this anxiety and weariness could be alleviated if we just ... switched off instead?
The supreme irony here is that most of the services these apps highlight already offer RSS feeds…
YouTube, Bluesky, and Mastodon accounts all have RSS feeds that can be imported into any old-school RSS reader. (Bluesky’s support is infuriatingly basic, but it exists.) As @Sebby says, it feels we are thinking too hard about a problem that could be solved more effectively by campaigning for improved RSS generation at the source — which is often a matter of detail.
Yes, RSS feeds could be switched off at any point, but a platform that decides to “go dark,” like Twitter before it turned into 𝕏, will probably cut off API access at the same time…
@Tarsier Yes, I wish Mastodon supported an RSS feed for my timeline rather than just for each individual user’s posts.
