I barely even noticed they got replaced. They never got to have any story involvement or character development, just like most of the rest of the bridge crew in Discovery.

Cheogram Android has the send half of URL preview. I will be adding display on the receive side this year when I get the time.

I really found the coda/epilogue to be distracting. The end of the main story ended in a good place, with Burnham and Booker heading off on their next adventure. And then suddenly we're getting this long drawn-out "and then later after many adventures they... did something useless we can't explain but at least they saw their old friends again the end" just really took the wind out of it.

You mean you'll only see content from people you follow and only people who follow you will see you content? Sounds like working as intended the way things were meant to be.

Well, perhaps the UI themes don't look like what you prefer, I can't predict that one way or the other, but none of them are "outdated".

There is no one app that runs on all of those right now. Snikket has apps for both Android and iOS but it's two apps not a cross-platform app. You'll likely get best results using an app optimized for the platform in question (such as Cheogram Android, Snikket iOS, beagle.im, or Movim).

Which platforms do you want it to "cross" ?

Stop looking at the federated timeline. Look at posts from people you follow only and you'll never see spam.

Why would you want this? If you want to see posts from someone, you can follow them.