I think I now get the point of what Iconfactory wants to build with the Tapestry project.

After work yesterday I laid down for a bit and did some scrolling on the phone. I checked Facebook, Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky—and I think I then suddenly got what Iconfactory is doing: One client for all those platforms and for RSS too. And Reddit, smart devices, newsletters, news sites like the New York Times and Washington Post, blogs, YouTube, Tumblr and anything else that outputs a stream of information.

Previously I didn’t get it. I thought that existing RSS readers like Newsblur and Inoreader can already do those things. Mastodon, Bluesky and Reddit emit RSS feeds, and many RSS readers can consume newsletters.

But RSS readers can’t give you an experience comparable to a native client. What if you had one stream that gave you a unified view of multiple services and the experience for each service would be just as good as a native client?

If I understand Tapestry correctly, it will be a niche product, at least at first. Most people only use one or two social platforms at most. But for the extremely online—like me—something like Tapestry could be very useful indeed.

Assuming I actually understand the direction the app is going in.

The chief obstacle to all this isn’t technical. It’s legal. Meta and Twitter are outright hostile to third-party clients, and Reddit now wants to charge big bucks for third-party access. The EU is pushing to require interoperability, but it remains to be seen whether the legal and business environment changes to permit something like Tapestry.