Indigo: The Big Solve For Open Social
I miss old Twitter. Pre-2010 when it was a Worldwide West of ideas and opinions. Before people had discovered that being a dickhead could garner you a lot of attention. Before big celebrities dominated the conversation. It was just some excited nerds reaching out and saying hello. I still have real-life friends met back then.
These days Twitter is long gone. replaced with a right-wing hell hole. The least fun social media site on the internet. Built to take its place are decentralised social apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads (to a certain extent), and other smaller options. I've settled on using Bluesky and Mastodon. Both have their own positives — Mastodon is great for keeping in touch with small communities like app builders and tech types, while Bluesky is more like a town square. It feels vibrant and busy.
What I don't like is that, until recently, these two social groups were kept apart. Until, that is, until Indigo came along.
Indigo, from Aniline Applications, lets you sign into Bluesky, Mastodon or both. Other apps have tried to merge the two and made a real hash of it. Indigo got it right on its first release and has kept getting better. It works across Apple devices and syncs your timeline between them.
It’s a deftly crafted experience.
The merging is where it shines. I tend to post to both networks at once, and Indigo sends it as a single post. When someone else cross-posts, Indigo stylishly folds the two copies into one. No double posts, no scrolling past the same joke twice. I no longer think of Bluesky and Mastodon as separate places. Each adds its own flavour to my personal timeline.
Photography looks great here too. I prefer a carousel for multiple photos, but if you’d rather have a grid, that’s an option. You can set GIFs and videos to autoplay or not, and choose whether audio is on or off by default. That matters to me, because I usually have music or a podcast in my ears while I scroll.
Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy built Indigo, and it’s obvious they use it every day. They’ve made countless improvements since launch, and they spot gaps before I do. They take feature requests seriously, and when a small bug turns up, it’s fixed fast. In these days of vibe-coded apps, that’s rarer than it should be.
Conclusion
Indigo is my favourite Bluesky app, hands down. Ivory might still just edge it on the Mastodon side, but that doesn’t bring the two networks together. I can’t recommend it enough — It's the one social media app that I'll tell people to try online. You should give it a go too.
