Catbird for Bluesky

Sorry for the long thread. I appreciate all the support!

Still not at a point where I trust its stability, it’s totally possible I’m over optimistic about a very difficult cryptographic protocol for group chats (MLS) but I have been using the OpenMLS library and am not hand-rolling my own crypto. So, we will see how all that turns out.

but inevitably I have also broken some and don’t want to ship out something worse.

I’ve also been experimenting with E2EE group chat functionality, and if it does end up working I plan on making it optional and opt-in. It would be text-only to start, but support bsky embeds and Tenor GIFs (sorry)

I’ve been a bit quiet on this account for a while, just like to thank people still using it and sticking around. I appreciate all the help and feedback. I tried to do some large-scale refactoring lately, and I’m just tightening things up. I’ve hopefully improved a number of things…

Gah. Sorry. It’s all in native Swift, I thought I nailed parsing a while ago especially since Swift is UTF-8 native strings, I think probably the issue is something getting messy because I needed to use UIKit for the post composer text box and that uses UTF-16

ah thanks, found a silly bug, it’s featured gated to iOS26 by accident

catbird settings sheet, Advanced setting highlighted

catbird appview service setting sheet

if you’re curious to try the @blackskyweb.xyz AppView, here’s how you can change your service after logging in:

The update is on TestFlight now. I’m seeing new bugs already, but you should be able to log in!

Catbird has unfortunately also been hit with this! I'm working on pushing out a fix now.

you can mention this account, or take screenshots and TestFlight will prompt you to send feedback, either is fine

oh yeah i did half-start that already. i also made it so you can configure an appview but i have no idea if it works lol

yes, it should. it should take you directly to the post. (also should switch to the right account if you have multiple)

not sure why that wouldn’t be working but i will investigate

Also working on general polish, crashes and bug fixes. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to see, and thanks for the bug reports!

Some things hopefully coming soon to Catbird:
- timeline more like the official app
- local on-device drafts
- feed interactions (show more or less like this) on supported feeds
- better list handling; pinned lists will display properly as feeds!
- push notifications will filter moderation lists

i just threw it in fast but you’re right i’ve noticed that. also the times and stuff lol. have to mess with the prompts

Were you able to post from the app?

i’ll look into those, thanks!

If anyone is having issues signing in after a while, there seems to be a bug on reauthenticating stale sessions that I need to fix; in the meantime, if you’re able to access the Account Switcher you can delete the account (by swiping) and try signing in again. That should work, if not let me know!

Seems to be back up, hoping the server doesn’t die again. Sorry for the flakiness there

after some technical difficulties the improved Mac version should be available on TestFlight now. Notification server seems to be down though and I am investigating

Join the Catbird for Bluesky beta Available on iOS

Just pushed out an update! Trying to polish and implement bug fixes; let me know if you have any issues after updating! iOS is out now on TestFlight and MacOS update should be out soon.

Notification server was dead... should be back up now. You can adjust notification preferences in settings, and your user post notification/activity subscriptions should start coming through!

were you able to get through the OAuth flow?

macOS was updated to Build 4 which is the same as 19 on iOS but fair warning i haven’t tested it yet lol

np ty for letting me know

is this on the newest version? i forgot to put the button on the main post but i thought i fixed it

I’ll look into the iCloud sync, in the meantime sorry about the logouts

Sorry about that! Fixing the session stuff is my top priority, hopefully I can nail it down soon.

A screenshot of the app Catbird for Bluesky, showing the search tab with trending topics and summaries

Just pushed out an update! For devices with Apple Intelligence turned on, trending topics now include a short summary of the topic based on posts in the feed!

Notification server has been down most of the day, working on upgrading it to support post notifications. Should hopefully have it back up tomorrow with a new build of the app with some bugs fixed. Thanks to everyone for sticking around!