With over 3 million users and plans to open up extra broadly within the months forward, Bluesky continues to be establishing itself as an alternative choice to Twitter/X. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped the developer neighborhood from embracing the mission and constructing instruments to satisfy the wants of these fleeing the now Elon Musk-owned social community, previously referred to as Twitter. One such mission is deck.blue, a Bluesky-flavored model of Twitter’s beloved (although typically ignored) TweetDeck — the latter which became a paid service final yr and has been rebranded as X Professional.
With deck.blue, Bluesky customers can view posts on the social community within the column-based format popularized by TweetDeck, together with issues like their house timeline, notifications, likes, lists, and even customized feeds. They will additionally reap the benefits of options like help for a number of accounts and scheduling of posts.
The deck.blue app, which is at the moment out there on the internet, was constructed by 25-year-old Gildásio Filho, a São Paulo, Brazil-based software program engineer who, by day, works on the music collaboration app Indaband. He’s teamed up with Japanese developer Shinya Kato, who handles extra of the backend infrastructure and works with the API.
Explains Filho, the thought for deck.blue happened final yr when he acquired locked out of TweetDeck after X started charging for the service.
“I made a promise to myself that if I ever got kicked out, I would build my own,” he says, referring to TweetDeck.
Filho then surveyed the panorama of Twitter alternate options and located that Mastodon already had a TweetDeck-inspired web interface, that was first-party constructed and “actually pretty good,” Filho says. However when he examined the choices out there to Bluesky customers, he was dissatisfied with the experiences that had been constructed up to now. None mirrored the TweetDeck expertise he was used to from Twitter.
“And, for me to start using Bluesky, I would need a TweetDeck. I can’t use it without it, it just doesn’t work,” Filho admits, echoing the complaints from many former Twitter energy customers when attempting to change to new platforms.
Picture Credit: deck.blue screenshot
The deck.blue mission started final August and inside a month of writing the primary line of code, it launched. Initially, the app was known as Bluesky Deck, however Bluesky urged that utilizing Bluesky within the app’s title wasn’t the best transfer. So Filho renamed the app deck.blue and employed a designer to work on the branding.
Since its launch, deck.blue has been fast to tack on new options as quickly as (and even earlier than) Bluesky makes them out there to the broader neighborhood. That was the case with the launch of hashtags, support for lists, and the launch of the app’s scheduling feature, for instance. Notably, deck.blue was among the many first third-party apps so as to add help for hashtags, which led to a post about the feature going viral on Blueskly with 1.5K likes and a whole lot of reposts. (Bluesky’s definition of viral is far smaller on account of its restricted viewers, in fact).
Whereas there are different apps that supply scheduling for Bluesky, Threads, X and different social networks, like fedica and Postpone, deck.blue is aiming extra at an influence person viewers, not social media managers who want the analytics and reporting rivals supply.
Now that deck.blue is extra totally developed, Filho is seeking to generate a bit of additional earnings to help the mission after having added multi-account support, on-line sync, and Patreon integration a number of months in the past. On Patreon, loyal customers can help the app at charges of wherever from $2 to $7 per 30 days — costs that undercut TweetDeck, which now requires an X Premium or Premium+ subscription ($8 per 30 days and up).
Although Bluesky’s person base is dramatically smaller than X’s, Filho is betting on a future the place it prospers.
“When they actually launch and remove the invite codes…I’m afraid of how big it could get,” he says. “I think Bluesky is losing users by not having invite codes [available]. So once they ditch that, I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep doing customer support on my own,” he provides.
