Tusky Android

Client for the social network called Mastodon

If you haven't heard of Mastodon, that means you're definitely not a trendsetter. It's a social network with a design and concept very similar to Twitter but that comes along with certain particularities that make it different.

The first thing that we notice is its design, that's closer to TweetDeck than to the social network of the blue bird, and the possibility to send private direct messages to any user. Nevertheless, the most noteworthy aspect of the service is the possibility to write messages of up to 500 characters instead of the 140 that we're so used to.

Competition for Twitter based on a similar concept.

But that's only the surface, because deeper down the differences are quite significant, especially in terms of philosophy: Mastodon intends to be a decentralized open-source social network. That means that users can connect through different servers, making sure that a single company cannot monopolize the entire communications system. In turn, it can't track the user's activities either.

Unofficial client for Mastodon

Well, whilst this social network is gaining more and more users (let's see how long this hype goes on for), a few Android clients have popped up to allow us to connect without needing to open a browser and access a web page from our smartphone or tablet. We're talking about Tusky, an open-source client with which we can interact on this new communications platform.

As you can imagine, its goal is to simplify the interaction between users and the sharing of multimedia files of the likes of images and videos. Thus, it offers us a clean and sober interface that contains the app's main functions:

• Clear separation between publications, followers, and users we follow.
• Notifications.
• Possibility to reply, retoot (a toot is basically a tweet), and tag posts as favorites.
• Send messages with the possibility to share multimedia contents from your phone or offline.
• Check your own timeline or those of your contacts.

So if you've already decided to give Mastodon a try, here's an unofficial client for Android. You've only got to download the APK for free and start tooting.

Requirements and additional information:

• Minimum operating system requirements: Android 7.0.