“Project Tapestry” by Twitterific Creators Aggregates Sites

The Iconfactory, creators of X’s (formerly Twitter) popular third-party client Twitterific, banned the app last year under Elon Musk’s management. They now hope to recover from the loss by developing alternatives. The Iconfactory is shifting its focus to Project Tapestry, the app that will collect content from social media platforms and news sites, similar to X. It will combine various platforms into one smooth experience. Moreover, the developers have already started working on a prototype and launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $100,000 for later development. It will support X alternatives like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Tumblr, but not X itself because of the third-party app ban on the platform.

Also, users will be able to track their preferred blogs and sites related to news and other relevant information on one platform. For example, they will easily get updates that were coming from X, such as weather news and alerts. The planned sources include National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite imagery and US Geological Survey (USGS) earthquake data. However, they will not combine Facebook and Instagram within the app. Other features of Project Tapestry might include marking items as read and remembering the reading position. Moreover, it will support both light and dark themes.

Notably, Twitterific allowed users to read the minimized versions of tweets and get a gist of the hidden content. If nothing goes wrong, The Iconfactory team might also inculcate an advanced feature that will allow users to search for content through their platform instead of browsing through the wider web.

The project’s lead developer, Craig Hockenberry, sent an email to The Verge that stated, “We started experimenting with ways to accommodate all these new sources of information and landed on an API that is based on JavaScript. It can work with anything that has an IP address and data that’s accessible with HTTP.”