Frequently Asked Questions

What makes Fedigardens different?

Fedigardens is designed to be simple, lightweight, and discussion-driven. Its design deviates from the standard social media app and is structured more like the Mail app or Messages app on iPhone and iPad.

From a technical standpoint, the app is written completely with SwiftUI and uses newer concurrency models such as async/await. It’s also designed to be more frugal and lightweight.

What? Like email? Why would I want that?

Glad you asked. While it may sound unappealing to view your Mastodon feeds like email inboxes at first, there are some advantages:

  • No infinite scrolling: Lack of infinite scrolling prevents “doom scrolling” behavior and forces you to manually engage with your timeline in a healthy fashion. This also allows for less networking resources and memory ot be used.
  • Shorter status previews: Short previews of statuses in the timeline list allow you to scan your timeline more easily and give you the choice to view which statuses to see in detail, along with any replies.
  • Statistics hiding: Hiding the number of favorites and reblogs by default helps ensure that you’re not falling victim to the engagement cycle of wanting more favorites and reblogs, allowing you to engage with the fediverse more healthily.

Why does Fedigardens cost money?

🧪 Prerelease Notice
Fedigardens is prerelease software at the time of writing. The app is available for free through TestFlight, though not all features may work as intended, and it is not fully representative of the final product.

It takes a lot of time and effort to develop and maintain the Fedigardens app, especially when the developers are working on multiple projects at a time. By having Fedigardens be a paid product, it helps keep the project running.

Where did Fedigardens come from?

We wanted to convey the idea of taking care of the garden that is your relationship with social media through the fediverse, and how important it is to strike a healthy balance. Initially, the app was to be called Gardens, but the name was already taken. To make it more unique, we added “Fedi” to the name to bring you “Fedigardens”.

The Fedigardens icon is heavily inspired by the garden symbols found in the open-world puzzle game Taiji. One petal is colored differently, partially because Mastodon doesn’t natively support quote statuses at this time. It also helps indicate that your attention is not fully devoted.

Why is Fedigardens not open-source?

We love the general ideas of free and open-source software and the general principles of allowing contributions and creations. However, we wanted to ensure that this is done safely.

We do not formally support Fedigardens being used to promote hate speech, harass others, and perform verbal acts of violence. As such, we felt that the Cooperative Non-violent Public License best represents our wishes.

Do you plan to make Fedigardens open-source?

It is very unlikely that we will use a license that is accepted by the Open Source Initiative or the Free Software Foundation, unless there exists an open-source license that accounts for ensuring software is used for social good, and that its developers are held accountable.

Do you have plans for a Mac app?

We love the Mac and want to make sure that, if Fedigardens comes to the Mac, it’s a damn good, Mac-assed Mac app. Currently, at the time of writing, we feel that our current codebase won’t translate well as the Mac app we want it to be. However, the idea is on our radar, and we’ll revisit the idea later as SwiftUI and other technologies improve.