When I heard the news that the sale of Twitter went through, I was literally shaking. My family and I have had a rough year health-wise. My wife was diagnosed with Lupus and my 5 year old started having panic attacks out of nowhere that resulted in seizure-like symptoms. We had to up our health insurance premium to $2500 a month (Yay America!) for access to specialists previously not in our network. Then I had a bad crash on my bike where I had a concussion and lost consciousness. (1 of 6)
We invested so much into Tweetbot over the past 11 years and to think everything was potentially going to end was the scariest thought. But as the days went on, I started to think more rationally and knew it would be okay. As much as Twitter has brought us success, it has also been extremely frustrating for the past 6-7 years trying to build something great with a nerfed API. (2 of 6)
The concept of Mastodon is great. Sure there are a lot of core issues that haven't been solved yet. But a decentralized social network with an open API is a dream for us...as long as there's a big enough user base for us to make a living. After spending some time on Mastodon again, we decided that we couldn't just sit around to see what happens at Twitter. We decided to port Tweetbot over, but something amazing happened in that process. (3 of 6)
Building an app for an open and decentralized social platform felt so refreshing. Inspirational! I haven't been so excited designing something in a long time. With Tweetbot, we were always fighting with the API limitations while knowing in the back of our minds that someday the API could be taken away. I didn't realize it then, but that killed a lot of our excitement and enthusiasm. With @ivory, we are just ecstatic every single day. It's just been a pure joy to make software again. (4 of 6)
Seeing this place grow in users just makes us more excited to make the best Mastodon Client we can. Tweetbot isn’t going anywhere unless Twitter shuts it down or people stop paying for it. It will continue to get updates (we’ve been in the middle of a big update that’s been delayed by all the craziness happening over there). But now Ivory is where we will be doing our best work and then push relevant features to Tweetbot. The irony is Ivory will probably make Tweetbot much better. (5 of 6)
With all this, I'm just trying to say we truly appreciate everyone's support. The last 7 years or so have been wild with many ups and downs for the company (and our personal lives). Working on Ivory just feels so right. Being an indie-dev (or self employed in general) can bring so much anxiety at times, but I feel at ease even in this chaotic transition phase. Thank you. (6 of 6)