Last week, Twitter banned third-party apps. This week, one of the best Twitter apps has been reborn as Ivory, and it's already bringing more people to Mastodon.

There are a handful of reasons to stay on Twitter instead of switching to Mastodon, and until last week, one of those reasons was that Twitter simply had better apps. But since the company shut down third-party apps last week, there’s one less reason to stay on, especially since Tapbots, the developer behind Tweetbot, just launched Ivory for iOS , which should make a lot of people a lot more comfortable making the switch.

"I can't praise Ivory more than it's largely the reason I still use Mastodon. Before Ivory, I always felt friction when trying to use Mastodon. I gravitated back to Twitter because it was easier. But when I finally got into the Ivory beta, the platform gave me so much more weight. It was like this client app gave Mastodon years of experience in one fell swoop, and now I was using a seemingly more mature platform," said Chris Hannah, a software developer and social media publisher, on his personal blog.

Mastodon is a lot like Twitter, except it’s designed to make Twitter’s most toxic problems impossible. Instead of being a single, monolithic service, Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol to enable decentralized connectivity. You can join any one of hundreds or thousands of Mastodon “instances” and continue from there. If your instance gets bought out by a megalomaniac, you can move to another instance and pick up where you left off.