Tweetbot’s developers are making a Bluesky client

Tapbots, the developer behind the well-loved Tweetbot and Ivory apps for Twitter and Mastodon, is working on an iOS and Mac app for Bluesky called Phoenix, as spotted by MacStories. The company plans to release the app this summer and says it will open a “limited public alpha as soon as we can.”

This isn’t a move away from Mastodon; after Phoenix is out, Tapbots plans to develop both Ivory and Phoenix concurrently. “Mastodon is our home on the social web and we will continue to invest our time there,” Tapbots says in a Q&A on the Phoenix landing page. “Since the incredible growth of Bluesky in the past year, our customer base has become split between the two services and for us to continue to thrive as a company, we must support both. Unfortunately, we can’t survive on Mastodon alone.”

The company adds that “Mastodon is our home base and we believe in ActivityPub as the future of the social web. We just hope it can continue to grow.”

Tapbots will offer a way to cross-post between both Mastodon and Bluesky, but it says that “while there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate.”

While you wait for the app to release, you can follow the Phoenix account on Bluesky right now.