Indigo unifies the Mastodon and Bluesky timelines

Indigo, from Soapbox Software, is a new social media client that combines Bluesky and Mastodon timelines in one place. I’ve been using it for the last month or so as my primary social-media client—and it’s so good that I’ve largely stopped using individual clients dedicated to the two services.

Indigo makes it easy to cross-post to the services, which is unsurprising given its pedigree—its creators, Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy, made the cross-posting app Croissant before they made this. Since the services offer different character limits, Indigo shows you countdowns for both in one place. The app offers some other cross-service niceties, like identifying very similar posts on both services and de-duping them—though I still see not-quite-identical posts from time to time.

Indigo excels at scrolling through a timeline. Get too far beyond that, though, and you’ll find that it’s still definitely a 1.0 product. There’s no way to search within your timeline, tapping to expose an entire thread can be very slow, there’s no support for Bluesky lists, mute filters aren’t applied immediately to all items in a timeline, and occasionally I found that it just wouldn’t let me interact with some posts until I quit and re-launched the app. I also found the app’s choice of colors—blue for Bluesky, purple for Mastodon—to be impossible for me to differentiate as a colorblind person. (Fortunately you can add a badge on each account’s avatar, but it would sure be nice to pick a better color scheme.)

While I prefer Indigo because I want to scroll a timeline once and only once, it’s not yet at the level of a dedicated app like Tapbots’s Ivory for Mastodon. But this is a brand-new app, so I accept that it’s got room to grow. Ben Rice McCarthy has a nice blog post about how the project came to be, and another about how its design evolved.

Indigo is available for free on the App Store. For the Ultraviolet level, which allows interaction with posts, you can pay $5/month, $35/year, or $120 for a one-time purchase.