One App, Two Social Networks: How Indigo Lets You Use Bluesky and Mastodon Together
Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy have launched Indigo, a new app that brings together two decentralized social networks—Bluesky and Mastodon—into one place. The app, available on the Apple App Store, lets you read posts from both networks in a single feed and post to both at the same time.
Think of it like a mail client that combines your Gmail and Outlook inboxes. Instead of switching between two apps to check different social networks, Indigo pulls everything into one unified view.
What Indigo Does
The app's main feature is combining your feeds from Bluesky and Mastodon into one timeline. You can log in to multiple accounts across both platforms, and all their posts show up together in chronological order.
You can also post to both networks at once. Instead of typing a message twice—once for Bluesky and once for Mastodon—you write it once in Indigo and it goes to both places. This removes a hassle that has kept some people from using these smaller networks.
The app has also added support for Threads, Meta's newer social network, so it's becoming a broader tool for connecting to different social platforms beyond just Bluesky and Mastodon.
How It Works Behind the Scenes
Bluesky and Mastodon work differently at a technical level. They use different systems to handle posts, likes, and replies. Indigo's job is to translate between these systems so they work together smoothly. The app handles the technical differences so you don't have to.
When you use Mastodon through Indigo, the app connects to the standard machinery that powers Mastodon and other compatible networks. Your posts can reach not just Mastodon users, but also people on other similar platforms.
With Bluesky, the setup is slightly different, but Indigo still makes it work. You keep control of your account identity, and in theory you could move to a different app built for the same network if you wanted to.
Why This Matters Now
Both Bluesky and Mastodon have grown as people look for alternatives to Twitter after its ownership changed. Bluesky feels familiar to people who used Twitter, while Mastodon appeals to those who want a different kind of social network—one where communities can govern themselves.
The broader shift here is important: we have seen this pattern before, when RSS readers helped people manage feeds from many websites in the early 2000s, and later when apps like Hootsuite and Buffer let people post to Facebook and Twitter from one place. When underlying technologies settle down enough to be stable, but before one network completely takes over, these kinds of tools show up and succeed.
The Practical Side
Indigo lets you customize what posts go where. If you want to share something to both networks, you can. If a post only makes sense for one audience, you can limit it. This flexibility acknowledges that different social networks have different communities and different styles.
It is available through Apple's regular App Store rather than alternative stores, which makes it easier for most people to find and install. The app was built by just two people, which shows it is possible to create useful social apps without massive resources. Both Bluesky and Mastodon let outside developers build clients like this one.
What Comes Next
The app's design suggests the developers thought about making it work with more networks in the future. They will probably focus on things like notifications and better filtering tools as the app grows.
The real question for decentralized social networks may not be whether any single one gets bigger, but whether tools like Indigo can make it easier to use multiple networks at once. If that works, people would be less locked into one platform. Indigo is an early attempt at that idea, and its growth could shape how other similar tools are built.
