It would have been more interesting as an independent activitpub connected service to help illustrate Fediverse != mastodon. Dont really need another twit app though.
Hopefully they contribute to the mastodon code too. Seems like a lot of people are making forks and frontends instead of improving the mastodon code (backend, and app)
The mastodon dev team is notoriously opinionated. A lot of forks/frontends start because the dev wants features that mastodon has refused.
I think the Mastadon theming looks pretty good but I really don't understand why it's so difficult to just rebuild their frontend on top of it? Can somebody smarter than me explain why that's such a challenge?
The main thing is that their frontend was built for whatever APIs their own platform supported. You can theoretically adjust the code to use the Mastodon API instead, but it can actually be kind of a tedious process to change everything over.
It's probably easier to mod an existing frontend to look and act the way they want, or write a new one from scratch.
The other thing is, it's still a really new instance, and kind of started as a community experiment. While it looks like it could be a big next step for Pebble, they're probably more interested in testing the waters before doing any serious committed development on it.
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;