Mastodon’s suggestion convinces me but I find its interface horrible. I don’t like the path Twitter is taking, but I don’t quite see how to jump into the federal universe. This is an idea I’ve heard repeated a lot in the last few weeks, and it’s true that the Mastodon website is not simple at all. With these columns and many different sections.

Fortunately, today we offer you a solution that we know, and it fits perfectly for those who just want a Twitter clone, but decentralized.

Mastodon’s client we’re looking for is Elk. It’s in alpha version, but it works perfectly. We suggest you take a look directly at yourself. The mechanism is very simple. Enter the address of the server you registered with and voilà. Basically we have the Twitter interface, but in Mastodon.

Instead of a baby bird or a mammoth, we have a deer. The rest is a very clean and perfectly recognizable interface with the message box at the top and the settings bar on the left. It is very fluid and adapts to both desktop and mobile devices.

Better than many Twitter apps. Elk is an open source application published on Github. This is a Progressive Web Application (PWA) and currently the performance is outstanding. As soon as we get started, one wonders to what extent it’s on Mastodon or whether we’re actually using a Twitter client.

What says engineer Marina Aísaa web application where we can ‘Add to Home screen’ from the mobile phone to have a direct access icon on the mobile even if it is not a downloaded application.

Easily accessible sections. In Mastodon we have the line of the people we follow, the local line of our server and the line of the combined domains. On Elk, different samples are lined up one below the other, one click away, and perfectly. This helps not to confuse us, because if there’s one thing about Mastodon’s basic interface, it’s that it’s not always clear from which trajectory we’re getting messages.

Search engine, dark mode and even zen mode. It is not only a beautiful interface, but we also have a search engine and settings such as dark mode, hiding counters or activating a zen mode; here the sidebar disappears temporarily giving toots full visibility.

Will the apprentice surpass the master? The discussion with Mastodon reminded me of Telegram with WhatsApp. I’m not ignoring that in the future Mastodon will be a much more complete and easier to use platform, but we will continue to visit Twitter because there are so many more people out there.

The outdated design of Mastodon’s main website has so far brought me back, but my day-to-day experience with Mastodon has radically changed as I see there are much more complete and modern clients.

on Xataka | Thousands of users are jumping from Twitter to Mastodon. There they encounter unexpected surprises.