Introducing Twitter Lite | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Twitter Lite

blog.twitter.com

280 pointscoloneltcb158 comments

Correct me if I am wrong - but this thing being branded as "Twitter Lite" and marketed on lite.twitter.com is actually just the mobile web app, available at mobile.twitter.com ... right?

Seems to be the case. I use the mobile twitter web app because it crashes less than the native app on my older phone. It does seem noticeably faster now.

This seems like a weird branding/marketing push for what is essentially "we did a performance pass on our mobile website"

Was mobile.twitter.com a PWA before? That's what I thought the big change was - using service workers to offer offline/slow connection functionality.

I also use(d) the old mobile.twitter.com site on my original iPad because the app would not run (memory limit)

See this new mobile.twitter.com has me wondering: What did they change?

Same here. I think it is faster now, though I've only just started trying it out. The article talks a lot about the stuff they did to make it faster - many thing. Also there is a Data Saver option under Settings, which may be new.

Yes, it looks like they rebuilt the mobile web app with React and decided to brand it as 'lite'. Purely marketing.

This is really nice, even on desktop. And fast. Love it.

Looking at them side by side you really get a sense of how much 'stuff' Twitter Heavy has compared to Twitter Lite.

It would be so good if they could apply a bit of this stripped down approach to the main site and really work on list/follow management features.

I'd really love to get more out of Twitter as there are a lot of great people on there but (unless I'm missing something obvious) there doesn't really seems to be many tools built in to help you do that.

A lot of those tools are in TweetDeck. Not sure why Twitter didn't integrate it more post-acquisition.

because it doesn't make them any money

With this new mobile site, does each twitter page still run javascript constantly?

EDIT: it seems they do not, thank god for that.

I love this. I was always frustrated by the ever-growing-in-size Twitter app. Which is around 105 Megabytes now (aka ~73 1.44 floppies). So I welcome this.

> Today, we are rolling out Twitter Lite, a new mobile web experience which minimizes data usage, loads quickly on slower connections, is resilient on unreliable mobile networks, and takes up less than 1MB on your device.

1 MB is “acceptable” by today’s standards, but when you think about it — 1 MB to display a few 140-character tweets?

Cmon, that's disingenuous. It does a lot more than just display a few text strings.

You've got routing, templates, event handlers, search, a lightbox, settings pages, the whole DM chat-style interface, the whole posting interface, and probably more that I'm not even thinking about.

Now I'm not saying that it couldn't be smaller - quite probably even substantially smaller. It'd be great to get it down to 100KB. I bet you could have a much smaller first load for just the feed, and then dynamically load in the JS for the other routes as they're requested. That could then be cached locally with service workers.

Edit: Looks like they do actually already do that. I just unregistered their Service Worker and refreshed - my load was ~300KB. Still kinda weighty but a lot less than 1MB.

From https://blog.twitter.com/2017/how-we-built-twitter-lite:

> the app streams the initial HTML response to the browser, sending instructions to preload critical resources while the server constructs the initial app state. Using webpack, the app’s scripts are broken up into granular pieces and loaded on demand. This means that the initial load only requires resources needed for the visible screen. (When available, a Service Worker will precache additional resources and allow instant future navigations to other screens.) These changes allow us to progressive load the app so people can sooner consume and create Tweets.

That's like saying basketball is equivalent to just throwing a ball through a hoop. You are oversimplifying it.

It's because Twitter (the company) has no idea what to do with Twitter (the product), and are trying to branch out in increasingly dubious ways.

For comparison, Tweetbot is 7.6MB and Twitterific is 10.3MB (both on iOS), and they provide a much nicer experience for using Twitter than the official app.

I don't understand why some mobile app are so large.

If Twitter can write a webpage that provides the functionality in only 1Mb then what is in the mobile app?

Answering my own question, I just unpacked the iOS Twitter client thinking that it must contain massive graphic resources or something. Nope: mostly frameworks, the biggest being the T1Twitter.framework - 80.1Mb of who-knows-what.

That doesn't include the 17 other frameworks all over 1Mb in size (there are innumerable other smaller frameworks) for periscope and other features.

Seems to me they could ship a 5Mb app that just wraps the Twitter web site and provides iOS native experience (notifications, apple watch, etc) and call it a day.

This is pure speculation on my part.

I believe that, currently, if you iOS app uses any Swift code, you have to include the Switch libraries in your app. This has something to do with how quickly Swift has been changing, and Apple wanting you to reference your own library instead of the system one for now.

This has caused a number of apps to balloon in size lately, but the hope is that it is temporary.

The Twitter app uses swift and does include some 20 libSwitch* frameworks that account for a grand total of 20Mb - most of them are pretty small.

It is unfortunate that apps can't dynamically link to standard swift libraries in the OS, but that still doesn't explain the other 150Mb of binaries.

Twitter currently occupies 195 MB on my mobile device.

493.2 MB here. Sheesh.

Most of that is image cache though.

As a user, that's totally opaque to me. I know my phone is running out of space and photos in general and Twitter in particular take up most of that space.

Why is Twitter so aggressive with image caching? The nature of the timeline is that it's unlikely you'll see an image more than once.

Tell me about it - Reddit's app does the same thing. I'll be browsing for an extended period of time and will get the "storage full" message. I then check usage settings and it's up over 600 (whereas normally it's ~200)

At least they finally offered a way to dump the cache on ios a couple weeks ago.

oh? how?

Me tab > Settings button > Settings and Privacy > Data Usage

Awesome, thank you! That clears up a solid 200MB. <3

The excellent Twitter app Twidere is only 9.3 MB. [0] No ads either!

[0] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=twidere&fdid...

Seconding recommendation, but there are drawbacks: it's nearly impossible to read an entire thread by a person, and sometimes even seeing the chain of parent tweets is difficult.

That is an unfortunate limitation of the Twitter API for 3rd party clients. I've heard that the new way threads are presented on the Twitter website is also terrible.

The Android APK is around 30-31 MB

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/twitter-inc/

Not only it's big, but it's a bandwidth hog as well... It's the most hungry app on my phone and I do a lot of web browsing on it. Twitter should not out-consume the web.

This is much better then the bloated main UI. But I'd wish an option for an even lighter HN like interface. It still doesn't look to good in a text browser like elinks. One or 2 lines per tweet max would be ideal. That and a rss/atom feed that can be fed into the matrix network and clients.

Originally it was a listing of 140c messages, ideal to quickly view the status of your friends to enhance social proprioception. Since then it unfortunately morphed into a bloated, marketing oriented and visual distraction party where it mostly serves the look at me and commercial agendas. Authenticity, tele-awareness, social proprioception and efficienty flew away with the original twitter bird. Did he have a name? Is he coming back one day?

They've got bills to pay. Something's gotta give. Are you willing to pay to use Twitter?

I was just thinking why not go the extra mile, I'd pay for using this though 1$/month - but I could also make it myself through tampermonkey or the api

Same here - I would pay $1/month without thinking. My max would be maybe $5/month, which I'd have to think about for a bit.

I'd pay a bit to use twitter. What I'm concerned about is that I'd like something comparable to "reddit gold" - a means to pay for other people to use twitter so they can continue to post there for my and others' benefit.

Yes, where do I sign up?

> "...can be fed into the matrix network and clients..."

There exists a matrix-to-twitter bridge that I believe allows for this use-case: https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-twitter

It might only be alpha phase, but why not give it a shot? I'm not the developer for that, but am a happy user of the matrix protocol. Also, there are plenty of users leveraging matrix with several other bridges as well such as irc, slack, gitter, etc.

Lightweight is awesome. I feel that the absolute most important next improvement is in managing spam and fake accounts.

Things like Lite keep me from deleting my account. But with less spam, I'd probably use my account.

I don't deal with spam much, I notice the occasional fav or retweet from obviously fake accounts, sometimes I get a mention too. But all of these happen once per month maybe and I do my job in blocking and reporting every account I notice. Once per month is a pretty low rate, I get more spam than that in my email Inbox.

I also have direct messages from everybody active. Since enabling it I haven't received any spam. Maybe I've been lucky :)

And I don't have an obscure account (https://twitter.com/alexelcu). Maybe more popular accounts see more spam, I don't know.

If you view twitter by hashtag, you see a lot of spam on popular hashtags - obviously fake accounts who've just put the top 5 hashtags on top of a link they're advertising.

Personal @spam is pretty rare.

My account is a similar size and I get hundreds of spam follows every year on Twitter. I always report and block them.

This is an interesting little service: https://www.twitteraudit.com

"takes a random sample of 5000 Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect"

It says that, as of 4 years ago, 28% of Paul Graham's followers were fake and 30% of Elon Musk's were fake.

I ran it and got as result 1005 Real and 32 Fake.

Well, Paul Graham and Elon Musk are insanely popular.

A couple other things I've noticed having to do with "promoted content":

1. uBlock origin seems to block ads in the normal web client, but not in the mobile web client (in desktop FireFox as well as mobile FireFox).

2. Mobile twitter client lacks the drop-down menu where you used to be able to choose "I don't like this ad".

Now that I look at it, though, that menu on the main twitter web app doesn't have that option any more, either. You can "report this ad", which isn't quite the same.

To get to the same menu in the mobile web app, you need to tap/click the add tweet, then choose the more options icon.

The normal twitter web app has now added a "dismiss" option on mouseover.

FFS, there's no consistency of interface across the three at all!

From what I understand, the twitter mobile web client uses react and from a quick look at the source, they're using css modules which means the class names are generated at build time.

Considering that most ad blockers work by identifying ads through class names, it would explain why uBlock origin wouldn't work on the mobile site.

Makes sense. Thanks.

This uBlock rule should do the trick, despite the use of CSS modules:

    mobile.twitter.com##div:has(:scope > div[role="article"] > div[data-testid="tweet"] > div > div:last-child:nth-child(3):nth-of-type(3))

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/351

Built mostly with Facebook tech: React, React Native, Jest, Yarn

Isn't ReactNative for native mobile apps though? This is a web app

> The client-side JavaScript application is developed, built, and tested with many open source libraries including React, Redux, Normalizr, Globalize, Babel, Webpack, Jest, WebdriverIO, and Yarn.

from https://blog.twitter.com/2017/how-we-built-twitter-lite

OP probably assumed React Native was in the list.

I think they used React Native for Web https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web

Wait what. A web framework, adapted to work for native mobile, adapted back to work on the web?

In React Native, you don't have the standard DOM elements since you're not working in a DOM, so it provides some standard elements that get turned into native components (Button, Text, etc). It looks like this is porting those components back to the web. Sounds silly at first, but looks like it can be useful for RN shops.

Its another step to try an unify building apps, and web apps with the same code.

I believe the author of that module is also one of the main people who worked on the react twitter mobile.

No.. it's PWA.

Sorry, I added React Native by mistake and was not able to edit my comment later.

Doesn't seem to use any kind of server-side rendering.

This comment is getting downvoted but if it's true, it's absolutely a good point. They are optimizing for what is inherently slower: loading JS in the client before anything can be seen or interacted with, rather than rendering HTML and forms so one doesn't have to wait for JS to compile and execute (and all the tracking bloat that comes with it).

It's a progressive web app. This means users shouldn't have to wait for JS download or compilation on repeat visits.

I don't know why my comment is getting downvoted. I was just making an observation after looking at the source.

It is not true, the slow part of web applications is loading over the network, server side rendering puts a dependency on the network and is therefore vastly slower.

With service workers and client side storage you can get to display at least a shell, sometimes the entire UI without touching the network. It is a lot faster

Where do you think that JS in a web page comes from? Not from the network?

Service workers are a cache (and background process), and you still have to consider cache misses. Even if you have a giant JS app and cache it, users still have to download all the JS to actually work offline no matter what.

Which is smart, because Twitter cannot afford the not invented here syndrome right now.

Isn't this basically twitter original? Anyone else remember when it was just text messaging basically?

History repeats itself. Seems like Twitter's history has repeated itself very quickly.

Twitter Lite appears to omit Promoted Tweets (for me, for now), which is a bonus for experience.

I imagine that won't last long :^(

Definitely did not. Top tweet when I logged in just now was a T-Mobile promoted...

Incorrect. I just saw one :(

Report all Promoted Tweets with "I don't like this ad." It confuses their system and shows them far less frequently. I get one ad every few days now.

That's never worked for me. I just get more esoteric promoted tweets, and just as frequently.

Why isn't this the default interface? It's so much more pleasant and faster than their main web UI.

I would guess because it's new and probably doesn't have 100% feature parity yet

It's great to have a less bloated site, but it still uses the same UI which is only viable for the most basic usage. The thing I want improved the most is list viewing and management. Right now the only good way to view lists is tweetdeck which only really works on desktop.

This Twitter lite seems to ignore lists completely. I like it, but lists are a killer feature for me.

If you click on your profile avatar image you can access your lists.

From that point, you can use the url for a specific list as your entry into "Twitter". So in some ways, the use of lists is better than the mobile app, because they are URL accessible.

On mobile, if you "save to home" screen, then that icon becomes a one click way to get to a list.

Looks great. And such beautiful URL structure. Will be my goto example to illustrate how to represent resources in the web.

Awesome. Hidden in the preferences is also the possibility to remove pictures completely!

Where exactly? I couldn't find it.

https://mobile.twitter.com/settings/

In the data saving settings sub category. The setting panel itself seems rather hidden.

This is going to sound negative, even though I'm glad this is here:

How did we arrive at a time where it is news-worthy to launch a non-bloated service client?

Or to phrase it differently: What is the claimed consumer gain of a bloated client?

More like this please. It feels like going back in time when I first tried a 100Mbps connection in the late 90s and all the web content was made to accomodate DSL and modems.

I support your idea that software is often bloated.

However, as usual you're doing the mistake of somehow thinking that you are a customer of Twitter's. Of course you're not, since you're not paying to use the service.

That turns things around so that you're the usual ad target product, meaning the app might swell to contain more candy to tease you into clicking, and so on.

Uh, and just to be clear I'm not meaning "you" in a very personal sense, this applies to me too when I use Twitter, of course. :)

I understand, but I have two counter points:

* I disabled UO, and I can see no ads on twitter, other than the occasional promoted tweet.

* Ads can be served very discretely (as pointed out above), and doesn't have to "bloat" a client from a sub-1MB to a 20MB app. Ads also doesn't have to adversely affect (much) how fast something loads.

A third point would be how much gain ads actually drive, but that's another discussion.

Well they can release something good after all. Look at the main Web UI. I don't know what they are thinking at Twitter. Its the most unintuitive UX I've ever seen.

E.g. :

Click on the Image -> Only the Image gets larger

Click on the frame around the image -> See the comments and Image is larger.

That's the happy scenario. Sometimes, the image is smaller.

And they have removed the scrollbars for no good reason at all.

Yeah and only one of the options allows you to do a right-click and "save image as".

Quite frustrating because I take photos mainly with the Twitter app and later at home download them and repost them on Facebook... oh and you have to take care WHERE exactly you right-click because sometimes it will give you a compressed version and not the ".jpg-large" version you want... and then you have to rename the image so that other sites accept it for upload.

This lets me do side-by-side full screen on a mac, which the full website can't do (not responsive so I can't make it narrow enough) and the mac app won't. The previous mobile site was nearly good enough, but required refreshing for new tweets. Very happy that this is available.

I hope they won't discard mobile.twitter.com it's lighter than lite and works without javascript

What exactly is the issue with allowing javascript. The entire internet runs on it. I keep seeing this comment on various other posts. Javascript is here to stay, and for you to get the best experience, or at all, you're going to need it.

Javascript does all sorts of nasty shit like opening the app store on my phone, animating pages, popping up "give me your email address!" notifications, tracking my web browsing, wasting my bandwidth, eating my CPU, dumb crap like making text fade in instead of just showing it to me. I find the web is a much more pleasant place if I can control what JS gets run.

It's expensive and slow to transfer over mobile data, and doesn't significantly improve the user experience.

javascript often is just unnecessary bloat (advertisers, trackers, useless animations, and so on) that's why people are angry at it.

More often than not, bare html do the trick.

> ... and for you to get the best experience, or at all, you're going to need it.

This simply is NOT true.

lite.twitter.com IS mobile.twitter.com - it's just a landing page that links you over to the mobile site.

I'm one feature away from making this my main twitter client on my phone: when I save a web app made to run by itself as an alternative or replacement for a native app to my home page, opening it should by default hide the trappings of the web browser.

The constant pop-in/pop-out of the header and footer makes tapping on things just obnoxious enough to make me not want to use it. I know some web apps have removed them, I just don't know why it isn't more common.

Also, it has that little bar at the top to open the site with the app. I feel like that should've been the first thing they got rid of.

I note that, in the "lite" version's settings pages, there is no "Content" section.

Does that mean that "Show me the best Tweets first" is enabled, disabled, or follows the setting in the main twitter web app?

I assume the latter, since toggling that setting in the Android app also shows it as toggled in the man web app, which would indicate it is probably an account wide setting.

However, if the "lite" (mobile, really) web app became the only interface, it would mean that we would lose the ability to change that setting, which would suck.

I get an error loading https://mobile.twitter.com in FIrefox (desktop): TypeError: Referrer URL https://lite.twitter.com/ cannot be cross-origin to the entry settings object (https://mobile.twitter.com) (Console output)

I've been using mobile.twitter.com on my desktop browser for a while in place of the main website, and I find it much better and more pleasant to use.

Seems pretty usable on the desktop, I might switch to this one to save uBlock origin from having a heart attack everytime I load up the main site.

Pretty soon they'll release twitter classic.

To get something similar on the desktop web, you can install the Refined Twitter Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/refined-twitter/nl...

Or just use mobile.twitter.com in a desktop browser.

This seems like the sort of thing they should have had out years ago considering their business depends on growth.

It looked like a better desktop client until I noticed that the search box does not display my saved searches.

Is a PWA really the non-bloated way these days, compared to a lean native app? What went wrong?

I guess it is when it can be instantly updated for all users. And it does work incredibly well. They've done a nice job!

Maybe native is just not really necessary for a news/message reader

FYI, https://m.twitter.com also redirects to https://mobile.twitter.com

That's great.

When viewing someone's profile:

On mobile the 'Tweets' tab shows Tweets, Retweets & Replies.

On desktop - Tweets & Retweets.

Is there a way to see only Tweets & Retweets on mobile?

For that matter, is there a way to see only Tweets, on mobile or on desktop?

IMO installing this alongside third party twitter apps will make a great combo for push notifications alone. My preferred app just refreshes all notifications hourly, which is obviously worse than the official app.

I would LOVE something like this for Facebook, but I understand that there is little to incentivize companies to do this other than the "emerging markets" argument.

Something like https://mbasic.facebook.com/?

Well there is

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.l...

and

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.m...

But neither seem to be eligible for some reason.

Near the bottom of the lite.twitter.com page it states "Twitter Lite...developed in partnership with Google." Is this the beginning of a partnership test with google as a sort of test to see how viable twitter would be to be acquired by google? Sort of like a few first dates before considering "corporate marriage"? Hmmm...perhaps my conspiracy theorist cap is on too tight. I wouldn't say that I'm a fan of either of the twitter or G+ platforms, but i can see some business rationale for google absorbing and continuing to run twitter - both the company and the platform. Ah, well.

Google might have helped out to promote the PWA technology which they are pushing hard.

How does this help their profitability? Expanding to developing regions when they can't make a profit in the US seems like a waste of time.

I'm sure that they have a lot of people trying to work toward profitability. But it's a big company. Lots of engineers. They still have a frontend team, and those folks gotta work on something.

"...folks gotta work on something" is exactly the attitude that unicorns with too much VC money take and end up tanking.

I don't know of any company, regardless of unicorn status, that fires their frontend team because their monetization team hasn't figured things out yet.

By making that platform more accessible to millions of potential users. Their main source of revenue are Ad's so anything to increase a user count would seem like a good direction to go in.

But when an advertiser looks at how many people they can reach that they're actually interested in, it doesn't matter if they have 10 million users somewhere else.

Investors are always focused on the rate of new subscriptions, if they can't be profitable they can at least say they are growing subscriptions in new markets and possibly save the share price

> Starting today, Twitter Lite is available globally by visiting mobile.twitter.com on your smartphone or tablet.

I would also like to use it on my desktop!

The same link mobile.twitter.com works on desktop browsers too!

It works fine on desktop. Just go to http://mobile.twitter.com

It's impressive how much faster it is on even a recent laptop on broadband (admittedly I'm "only" on DSL broadband, not fiber). You now click on a username, for example, and you get their page almost instantly. While on normal Twitter, there's a noticeable half-second or so lag for the transition to load and render.

You might LOVE the paginated, minimal javascript version you get if your user-agent is an older mobile browser like "Opera/9.80". You can use https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/uacontrol/ to set that just for mobile.twitter.com.

https://i.imgur.com/NfdM2sk.png

I wish we did not have to use such hacks though. And the normal mobile site has a huge header on my desktop, annoying.

I really like it - very fast. I note the Compose Tweet FAB is another step towards a bland, Google Material user experience.

That guy who does sarcastic hacker news summaries is going to have a field day with this

Using Lighthouse on Google Chrome shows that Twitter Lite has a score of 82/100.

I am so happy this is a website and not an app. No more walled gardens!

The term walled garden refers to service lock-in where membership and mode of access is tightly controlled. It's not about using an app.

But more often than not, apps are walled gardens. And that's really boring.

Finally Google is able to push its PWA concept to a potentially successful and widely-used product. Looks like a good replacement for the native app.

Sadly the Google stack (ionic, angular) is not so mature at this stage and twitter opted for the facebook stack.

Funny how now both Facebook and Twitter has "lite" versions.

Maybe a lightbulb should brighten somewhere and ux people would realize that lite in contrasts is not the same as lite in memory and CPU?!

(fat chance, they are too hung up about their "art")

The mobile site looks exactly the same as it always has?

It's nice. It's a shame that the reply / retweet / heart icons are tiny.

The font is also unreadably small, and there are no options to change font size.

If you like this, you should look up Facebook Lite and Messenger Lite. My phone runs so much better after switching to those.

"This item isn't available in your country."

That's disappointing. I should be able to choose Facebook Lite if I feel like it'd be a better experience for me.

Yeah, it's only available through Google services in developing countries, but the APKs are freely available online

We should take a cautious approach before analyzing the positive or negative aspects of Twitter Lite.

Broken on FF android, http://i.imgur.com/p3jWX87.png

Not for me. What phone, app version and OS version are you running?

I got that for a while but it seems okay now.

add /home/ to url

The only thing I miss is CTRL+RET for sending a tweet without clicking.

Got excited, clicked on it, and then realised I'd been using it for a while anyway.

Wish I hadn't given away my 2007 twitter account for free.

I deleted my Twitter account on January 1st of this year and I don't miss it at all.

Congratulations?

When twitter stated it ran via SMS, that was twitter as about as lite as you can get data wise.

SO in effect they created a problem to promote a solution that is still short of what they had originally.

Now I understand they need to make money but I personally find the promoted tweets they offer do seem to miss the target and are in need of some refinements in who they promote towards. I find it rare to find a promoted tweet that is relevant and the amount of PPI promoted tweets which I have objected to and still do is a clear sign of needing better control. Be that from analytics or even allowing the user to select preferences in a way that suits them better and by that aid Twitter in presenting relevant adverts.

I would be interested in seeing how well advertisers get on with there promoted tweets as I see so many with comments that indicated those targeted are clearly not the market audience and as such, very negative. Indeed I do that to PPI adverts, as a cathartic release of how I loath them.

that said if I see a promoted tweet of interest or of merit, even if not what I would use then I will support it. Only the other day was one for passports for toys, I don't even have children, let alone a teddy bear these days. But loved the idea and fed back my encouragement and had a most delightful exchange with the owners. Have to encourage and support positive avenues in life.

An HTML interface is worse than SMS?

Please, lets not pretend Twitter is worse with a richer interface with amazing features such as links and images.

WAT, No that was not the point I was making. The point I was making was twitter have done this to produce a lower usage client for users who are still upon the likes of 2G networks and with that they already had SMS, which is about as lite as you can get upon that platform.

As for the rest of your assertions, that is entirely a different matter and not one I raised in the slightest.

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