A new application named Tapestry made its debut on Tuesday. This app collects and organizes data from various parts of the internet and social media platforms into one unified location. It somewhat resembles the early Web 2.0 initiative, FriendFeed, which aimed to consolidate feeds and social media updates for user exploration and interaction.
While FriendFeed fostered on-site discussions and developed its own community—eventually leading to its acquisition by Facebook—Tapestry serves as a more effective reading tool.
The app addresses a growing issue of the open social web: the need for users to manage numerous services and frequently switch between applications to stay updated.
With the emergence of social networks like Bluesky and Mastodon, which aim to compete with major tech firms by utilizing open-source software and decentralized governance, it has become increasingly challenging to keep track of friends and connections who have dispersed across multiple platforms after leaving Twitter and Meta.
While Tapestry’s main feature is solving this problem, it may also limit its allure to just enthusiastic early adopters for the time being.
One App for All
Most users currently have established systems, workflows, and preferred tools for keeping up with their favorite news outlets, blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Tapestry aims to change this landscape by providing a centralized hub for monitoring updates alongside information from other social networks such as Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, and more.
Developed by the creators of the renowned Twitter client, Twitterrific, Tapestry introduces a novel timeline format akin to that of Twitter, where updates continuously scroll. Moreover, it offers enhanced customization options to tailor your timeline—like muting or “muffling” specific content—allowing users to view what they want while minimizing clutter on their screens.
This feature can help enhance both the aesthetic and emotional tone of your timeline. For example, you might prefer to muffle political discussions to avoid overwhelming your feed or manage spoilers from your favorite shows.
After you input the social accounts, RSS feeds, blogs, and podcasts you’d like to follow in Tapestry, you can customize your timeline as well as create additional timelines for a personalized experience. For example, you could set up one timeline solely for Apple-related news, blogs, and podcasts, while having another dedicated to your social connections on platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon.
To maximize Tapestry’s capabilities, users need to invest time in considering what kind of information and updates they’d like to monitor and how to organize them efficiently. Given the multitude of updates from social apps, a single chronological feed can become quite noisy. Your timelines represent Tapestry’s interpretation of customized feeds (similar to what Bluesky offers, but pulling content from various services). This positions users not just as mere consumers of content, but as curators of their own feeds—at least until a more comprehensive ecosystem of developers evolves.
Integrations and Custom Feeds
Although Tapestry seems to cater to the desires of early adopters of the open social web, its approach to aggregating content into timelines can occasionally come off as convoluted, and some user-interface aspects could benefit from refinement.
For example, Tapestry automatically opens feeds within the app when selecting the “open original” option from the ellipsis menu on individual posts.
Additionally, requiring an extra tap to interact with the original content may deter users who prefer to engage in social discussions rapidly as they scroll. When items are opened in-app, users need to log into the respective social network to participate. It might be more convenient to set Tapestry to launch feeds in “Safari” so that they can directly access the corresponding iOS app (like Bluesky), where they can easily like, reply, or share.
Sadly, this setup does not resolve the complexity of handling multiple accounts across various applications.
Another potentially confusing design element is the app’s dual sections for adding sources. One is labeled “Feeds,” while the other is termed “Connectors.” The former allows users to add “content that appears in your timeline,” whereas the latter is intended to “create feeds that populate your timeline.” (If you find those descriptions unclear, you’re not alone. There needs to be more guidance within the app.)
Connectors function more as plugins or extensions that operate within a JavaScript sandbox, which will be developed by a community of third-party developers looking to enrich the Tapestry ecosystem with fresh feeds. Unfortunately, these Connectors cannot utilize sources from Facebook, Instagram, X, or other platforms that don’t provide open feeds.
The idea of an expandable application is intriguing; however, it might have been better placed further along in the development timeline. Initial priorities should focus on validating whether users genuinely desire to see information from across the web—not just social media—conglomerated into “timelines.” Are users truly interested in having RSS feeds, podcasts, social media updates, and other services combined rather than maintaining separate apps for each?
A Step Forward or Just a Transition?
Tapestry is not alone in its mission to empower users to better manage their feeds and information sources.
Emerging social platforms like Bluesky and Meta’s Threads have introduced custom feed options, while startups like Graze focus on advanced feed customization features. Additionally, Flipboard has unveiled a new application named Surf, which allows users to create custom feeds spanning multiple services. Unlike Tapestry, Surf provides an interface that allows for filtering feeds to be viewed in various formats—whether watching, reading, or listening—or allows for a combined view based on the selected tab.
Other applications such as Feeeed and Reeder have also surfaced to address similar concerns related to feed management.
These innovative solutions aim to resolve the complexities arising from the fact that today’s open social networks utilize diverse protocols. For example, platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed employ ActivityPub, while Bluesky and its expanding collection of clients are built on the underlying AT Protocol. In contrast, traditional news outlets, blogs, and podcasts disseminate their information through the RSS open protocol.
Currently, efforts are underway to create connections between networks like Bluesky and Mastodon while social apps like Threads pursue integrations with ActivityPub. Meanwhile, blog platforms such as WordPress and newsletters like Ghost are striving to join the open social web known as the fediverse through ActivityPub.
We find ourselves in a transitional phase where one cannot simply select a favorite app and expect to have a complete view of all content.
Instead, users are being equipped with tools to combine feeds and sources according to their preferences. However, many current efforts may feel like stopgap solutions as a new, interconnected, and open internet continues to take shape.
Compiled by Techarena.au.
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