one day with Indigo

A new app came out today with big promises of unifying your Bluesky & Mastodon experience. It’s called Indigo from Soapbox Software. I’ve followed the developers on Mastodon for awhile so new it would likely be quite lovely and a thoughtful user experience. As I use both Mastodon and Bluesky and love the idea of simplifying to a single app, it was a quick download. Now the big lingering question: will it actually simplify my social media experience or be more of a burden than it’s worth?

launch experience

Getting started worked pretty well but I had a couple of hiccups. Things started with a Bluesky sign on screen. I was a bit worried about this because I use a PDS and not bsky.social for my account; it’s not uncommon for apps to ignore PDS users (Tapestry took ages to add PDS support). I initially thought that was going to be the case here as I put my info in (account and app password) and got a non-descriptive “sign in expired” error message. What wasn’t clear was the fact that you can click on the globe to get a server input field where you add the PDS server directly (other apps I’ve used have infered it from the username). Once I figured that out, login worked great. 

Mastodon 0auth login was a breeze; zero issues with it. 

You are next met with a rather unfortunate “pay up” screen, no trial included. It’s pay or be dumped in read-only mode with no taste of any real platform management. This felt not great. It’s not a cheap yearly price (I’d consider cheap in the $10-15 range) that’s an easy tap and instead needs some hands on experience (at least in my estimation but it is one I’ve seen repeated on social media by others as well). Going just off of read-only mode is a much harder sell.

real world use

I entered read only mode to see what I could see. The interface is really lovely and threaded view is one of the nicest iterations I’ve seen. Having timelines "entangled” is also mostly really nice. Reading just felt so much nicer than either Mona (what I’ve been using for Mastodon) or the Bluesky app. Hands down. It tipped me over the edge to fully switch, begrudgingly (I’m still a little miffed there isn’t a week long trial, at the very least).

I spent some time on my lunch break checking feeds. I spent some more time after dinner (and before sitting down to write this). It is a nice experience and it’s felt nice not reaching for separate apps. 

whats next

I’ve come across two major issues: muting and feeds in Bluesky.

Muting is weird. When I mute someone, I’d expect everything to be muted. Instead, boosts and/or retweets are still getting through. This is particularly frustrating because the account I was wanting to mute was because they constantly boost. I could unfollow or block but I wasn’t necessarily wanting to “break” relationship in that way - muting should be sufficient.

Custom feeds in Bluesky seem completely broken. I’ve got a few custom “pinned to home” feeds in my Bluesky account. Bluesky shows them. Boost Blue shows them. They are completely non-existent on Indigo and I have no clue why (See the screenshots). 

For long term sustained usage I think I’d need both of these things working right. Regarding the first, one of the developers indicated to me that they are planning some updates to muting behavior. I’m hoping the that’s true for Bluesky feeds as well.

I’d also love to be able to choose the feeds that are combined (and potentially have multiple combined options). I’ve spent time curating lists on both platforms to fit different goals (ie, browsing about life updates, browsing tech news or general news and similar). It’d be great to combine similar feeds in both. 

All in all, I’m hopeful for where Indigo is going, bumps not withstanding. It really is a nice browsing experience.