TLDR

Best-o-Masto is an alternative Mastodon client that does very little, but on purpose. When you open the app, it shows you the 20 most popular posts in the last few hours. You can favorite those posts, boost them, or open them in a real Mastodon client, and that's about it.

There's a basic posting interface if you want to post text and some photos. There are a couple of settings you can tweak to customize the experience a bit, but it's intentionally simple.

Best-o-Masto is a free app with no in-app purchases and is available on the App Store for iOS and iPadOS.

A bit longer

I say with complete sincerity that Best-o-Masto is my favorite new app on my home screen in quite a while. Yes, I made it, but I made it because nobody made the Mastodon client that I wanted to exist. I don't want to get sucked into my feed. I don't want the noise to make me miss the important stuff. I just want to see what's going on and I want to get out.

For me, at this point in my life, that's the healthy way to use social media, and absolutely no social media apps that I know of treat it this way. Mastodon has anywhere from a couple hundred to over a thousand posts appear in my feed when I come back to it after a day away. Threads and Bluesky have infinite scrolls that will continue showing me posts until I burn out, but Best-o-Masto doesn't do that. It shows me 20 posts and I'm done.

There is a way to refresh the feed if you want, but it actually blocks you from refreshing more than once per hour. Your initial reaction when using this app might be, "Wow, he hasn't done a good job with retention," to which I would say that is exactly the point. This is a social media app that was built for you not to use it much.

Candidly, as a relatively amateur developer, especially compared to the likes of people making apps like Ivory and Mona, this also plays to my advantage because I don't have to build every single feature with as many customization options as those apps have to.

Instead, I was able to laser focus on this one idea of a short feed of important posts from your timeline, and that's it.

Now, one thing I learned early on is that there are some posts in here that I'm going to want to reply to, and so you do have the ability to tap one of these posts to open it in the web browser or in Ivory or Mona. I'm utilizing the URL schemes for both of those apps so that if you have them installed, you can easily go to the Best-o-Masto settings and have links to toots always open in the app of your choosing.

A couple other things that I think are worth calling out here are the fact that I also give you the ability to create your own top eight accounts and show that as a separate feed, which are just all of the posts from your top eight buddies, as though this is the MySpace days and you just want to see what they posted recently. I also included a fun little rainbow animation that outlines the top post in your feed when it refreshes, which happens to use a little hint of the HDR color features made available this year in iOS. I promise it won't burn your retinas, but it will pop a little bit.

This is also probably a good place to mention the one feature that was briefly in the app over the summer, but I eventually removed, which is a feature I called Hidden Gems. This feature used Apple's on-device LLM models to analyze all the other posts from your feed that were posted recently and let you see some of those which it thought would be interesting to you, even if they didn't get as many likes or boosts as the ones in your top 20. This worked okay, although one of the limits on the local model that developers like me are allowed to use is context window, and I simply wasn't able to feed in all of the post data in an effective way to get useful information out.

Basically, it would look at the first 20 posts at a time and give you what it thought was interesting from there. I was playing around with reducing the number of posts per batch, but this became very complicated and wasn't super useful to begin with, so I just pulled it out before the final release.

If I can find a good way to add this in the future, I definitely will, because sometimes it did bring up things that were interesting.

Best of all, I've decided to make Best-o-Masto completely free, partially because it is a quite simple app, but also because I wanted to give back to the Mastodon community, which, while I have issues with it, has been very good to me on the whole. I also want to support the development of ActivityPub, and I hope people enjoy this app. Best-o-Masto is available to download for free on the App Store.