The decline of X (formerly Twitter) under Elon Musk, has boosted engagement with alternative social networks like Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon, but it has also challenged early adopters who now have too many places to post. Naturally, some entrepreneurs are working to solve this problem with apps that let you cross-post to multiple platforms at once. One of these apps, Openvibe, is now making itself even more useful with its recent support for Meta’s Threads, the X competitor from Instagram.
Launched earlier this summer, Openvibe initially made it possible to stay connected with friends and followers across Mastodon, Nostr, and Bluesky, by allowing you to view posts in a combined timeline and cross-post to the different networks at once.
Similar to how an app called Trillian once aggregated instant messaging networks like AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and others in one place for easy chatting in the early 2000s, Openvibe does the same for the many social networks that want to become the new place to “tweet.” According to Openvibe CEO Matej Svancer, the company’s mission is to offer a friendly, “easy-to-use gateway” to the open social web, which today spans networks built on different protocols, like ActivityPub (Mastodon, Threads), AT Protocol (Bluesky), and Nostr.
While there are some existing bridges being built across these networks, they may require additional servers, mirror accounts, and user opt-ins, Svancer explained. He believed this wasn’t the best path forward, and that a simple cross-posting app would be a better solution to lower the barrier of entry for new users.
“I believe the open social space can challenge legacy social media, but only if it’s united,” the founder earlier told TechCrunch.
With the addition of Threads support, which rolled out to Openvibe this week across iOS and Android, users can now log in with their accounts and cross-post and reply across Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Nostr. They can also follow people in unified feeds from all the networks and see suggested followers from each network, Svancer says.
He notes that, while the Threads API is still “quite limited,” Openvibe worked to take full advantage of the functionality it offered to create a user-friendly experience, where the app currently remains free to use and free from advertising. More features will be added over time as the Threads API itself evolves and improves, the founder noted.
Since launching support for Threads, some users reported having trouble getting the app to work, but Openvibe has pointed them to their troubleshooting documentation for assistance. This guide suggests that OAuth will sometimes not function properly and requires a series of specific steps to fix. (We were able to add Threads without issue, when testing, however.)
The new release that includes support for Threads also includes a few bug fixes and an updated post-composition flow that offers a “smoother, more reliable experience,” Openvibe claims.
The app is a free download on iOS and Android but later plans to experiment with a desktop version. To generate revenue, the app will later introduce a subscription plan, but that has yet to arrive.
Openvibe isn’t the only cross-posting app to address the problem of the alt-Twitters. In addition to more professional solutions aimed at social media marketers, Croissant is another consumer-facing app that supports cross-posting to Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. However, it already has a subscription plan implemented, starting at $2.99 per month.