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Elon Musk’s acquisition of X (formerly Twitter) has almost caused a ripple in the fabric of social media, with new platforms blooming everywhere trying to reel in users leaving the now Musked-up platform. Having more choices is always better. But if you’re one of the users who’s now forced to juggle between the likes of Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky because you couldn’t make your mind up about which one to stick to, there’s now an answer of sorts.
A new app has burst into the scene claiming to offer a decentralised “all-in-one” social experience. Dubbed a rather assertive ‘Yup,’ it lets you access the aforementioned apps from a single place. Let’s take a look at its capabilities and if it’s worth it.
What is Yup?
Yup is essentially an app that lets users cross-post content across various platforms (microblogging ones mostly), providing a centralised hub for reading feeds, following friends across services, and cross-posting to various platforms. Five platforms are supported currently – Farcaster, X, Bluesky, Lens, and Threads, with the likes of Mastodon and Nostr also in the cards.
Yup integrates some of the functions users are already familiar with, such as the ability to leave comments, a ‘like’ button, and a repost button. There’s also support for ‘For You’ and ‘Following’ feeds. Additionally, the app aggregates notifications from connected platforms, presenting them in a unified feed.
Particularly interesting is the support for Threads. Threads doesn’t currently offer a publicly available API that developers can plug into to connect the platform to their apps. Yup told TechCrunch that the app “informally uses the internal API” that Thread’s web client does. But Instagram head Adam Mosseri had announced last month that an official Threads API is indeed under development. When this arrives, Yup says it will hop onto that instead.
Yup is now live in the App Store!
If you’re new here, Yup is the all-in-one social aggregator for Twitter, Farcaster, Lens, Bluesky, Threads, and more.
iPhone: https://t.co/fcgzNkztrR
Android: https://t.co/YEIRd0nz4O pic.twitter.com/3SnYlM2aEK
— Yup ☁️🌿🟣🐦🧵 (@yup_io) November 16, 2023
This patchwork means you’d have to turn off Instagram’s two-factor authentication to log in, although this isn’t recommended at all. Yup indeed failed to connect to Threads for us initially, but managed to get through on the third try somehow. The first two tries did lead to Instagram notifying about an “unrecognised device” logging in, though.
How’s Yup useful?
The core pitch from the Yup crew, according to TechCrunch, is that their tool will let both regular folks and creators easily cross-post content not just to mainstreamers like Twitter or X, but also to decentralised protocols like Mastodon. While existing tools like Fedica allow some cross-platform posting across X, Mastodon, Bluesky and others, Yup seemingly casts a wider net to also support Threads.
How can I try the app?
Yup is already available on iOS and Android to download so you can take the first steps to try it out right away. However, there is a bit of a catch – it seems there is some kind of waiting list that users have to go through before fully accessing the app.
Following a rather lengthy setup process that involves you logging in and granting multiple “approvals,” you are taken to a page that lets you connect various apps. The app failed to progress beyond this connection page, with the “Next” button unresponsive despite connecting our social media accounts. “You’re not (yet) on Yup allowlist,” a message at the top of the page declares, likely explaining why.
Regardless, now that we’ve signed up there’s a good chance that the app will sooner or later let us in. When it does, we’ll be sure to provide an update on what the experience was like.
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