I've had the idea for a weird kind of Twitter client for years. With Mastodon being all open, I've decided to do the experiment:
What if your Timeline looked like iMessage. A normal timeline confuses me to no end because everything is out of context.
My experiment, Ebou, is a Mastodon client that looks like iMessage. Conversations are grouped by friends and sorted by recent postings.
It is super basic right now, but this already feels much more natural to me 
@terhechte that's a neat idea!
@mttvll I've wanted to build this for years. Kinda happy I finally got around to it
cool.
Add a threaded conversation and I am in.
@FuckElon @terhechte @mttvll A big +1 for threaded messages! It’s the thing that maddens me the most about the Mastodon interfaces I've seen. In a thread of messages, it's currently impossible to tell if message 3 is a direct response to message 2 or message 1, especially since all the usernames in the thread so far tend to pile up into an undifferentiated traffic jam at the start of each message.
I can see how this is more of a challenge in mobile devices.
@terhechte @mttvll do you need testers?
@terhechte This looks so nice.
@tattooedDev Thank you! :)
@terhechte And conversations of multiple people could be group messages. That’s really cool!
@ricobeck Yeah, that would also be a great addition
@terhechte Love this. Hibou is the French for owl 
@a2 Ebou actually means "Elephant" in old-egyptian :) (according to German Wikipedia at least) 
@terhechte I’ve often been thinkjng about something like this, just never got around to creating it. Go for it!
@eerko Thanks!
@terhechte would be nice to have a testflight! congrats, btw 
@valv0 Thanks! Still a bit early for that. But I'll be posting updates on here as the app progresses.
@terhechte This breaks my brain in a really fun way. I'd love to try it out when you feel like sharing!
@terhechte Being able to try all these different Mastodon clients with completely different approaches is so exciting!
I really like when people experiment with new stuff and have fun while doing it.
It’s a neat idea! If you keep working on it, I’d love to give it a shot.
@overengineer Thanks! I'll be posting updates on here :)
@terhechte That is a great idea! Something different and innovative for sure.
@deanfx Thank you!
@terhechte @matthewcassinelli Wow! What a cool concept!
@kvenden Thank you!
@terhechte reminds me of Telegram with channels concept (broadcasting chats)
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@terhechte looks awesome, but I'm a Windows user, so for me it should be also a Windows client :D
@emill1984 The app is cross-platform (in theory, I haven't dared running it on Windows yet). So once it becomes available, it should also run on Windows and Linux 
@terhechte yes! This makes so much sense.
@terhechte this is really very cool 
@simonharper Thanks! :)
@terhechte @stroughtonsmith interesting, I’d give it a try
@terhechte @stroughtonsmith that’s a really cool idea!
@terhechte This is genius! 
Happy to help test it out when you get something up on TestFlight.
@terhechte hell yeah sounds cool.
@terhechte cool concept! Reminds me of when we had twitter in adium: https://blog.adium.im/2009/03/birds-of-a-feather/
@kimfranken I completely forgot that that existed! Thanks for the reminder. These Adium screenshots make me nostalgic..
@terhechte same! Sometimes I miss the times, where we had to consciously go online for instant messaging instead of being always connected
@terhechte Wow, never thought of such interface, but it would really help me to be up to date with specific accounts. It’s awesome. Is there a way to test it?
@CarlosSierraOz No, not yet. I shared a video of a super alpha version, but I'll post development updates here on Mastodon
@terhechte that’s such a cool idea! Looking forward to seeing where it goes 
@amyinorbit Thank you!
@terhechte that's a great idea !
@Aedius Thank you! :)
@terhechte of all new mastodon-ideas: I love this idea!
@terhechte This is really good! Reminds me of how you would visit people's FB pages before they made "the feed"
@terhechte This is a great idea! I keep a “Close Follows” list on Mastodon for people who I don’t want to miss a single post from, and I thin an interface like this would make more sense than a timeline for those closest or most interesting accounts.
@raygan @terhechte This was my reaction. I'd not want this for my general timeline. But, for a list of people that I'm trying to closely follow, it's an interesting interface to be sure to keep up to date.
@raygan I've noted that. It makes sense to select the timeline or a specific list for this kind of view
@terhechte that looks cool and excitng
@terhechte @stroughtonsmith That looks awesome! What’s the best way to follow development?
@brndnsh @stroughtonsmith I'll be posting updates here on Mastodon as the app improves and also share a link here once there's an alpha or beta
@terhechte Isn't that still out of context? Especially people posting a lot might contribute to different threads at different times. What IMO would be really interesting is a client that concentrates on properly displaying threads and splitting discussions, but I have no idea how that could look like. Just flattening it in some way is what makes stuff hard to read fo rme on those platforms.
@terhechte But I still like that people are trying out new stuff! The chronological timeline is kind of a pain...
@danrot I think it is less out of context. But tbh. I only started using it today (because like two hours ago I had a first working alpha version). So I'll see how useful it is over time as I improve upon it. I agree that a better way of showing threads and discussions is useful, though that is kind of a tricky problem because those can be very wide trees of posts.
@terhechte Cool interface, I’ll be eager to see where you take it.
@terhechte I looooooove this! Going to download it right now!
@terhechte ops...it's not on the AppStore. Where can I find this beauty???
@botolo86 It is still super alpha. I wanted to gather early feedback. I'll post more as the app improves (and a beta becomes available)