Show HN: I built a minimal Twitter web app with few rules | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a minimal Twitter web app with few rules

plaintweet.com

86 pointsramkarthikk34 comments

Open articleView on HN

There's also Nitter, which doesn't require sign-in: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

> doesn't require sign-in

This is a key why I would prefer to use Nitter.

This is pretty sweet. Only fault is I can’t seem to find lists.

Nitter supports lists the same way Twitter does. Example: https://nitter.net/NASA/lists/Astronauts

You can sort of create your own too (currently limited to ~25 profiles due to Twitter limitations), like this: https://nitter.net/SpaceX,elonmusk,ID_AA_Carmack

Great work! FYI there’s a layout bug: if the timeline contains a very long unbreakable string such as a long URL, it busts out of the container and causes the page to extend horizontally well beyond the viewport.

Thank you. Not sure how I didn't hit that scenario the last two days when I built it (maybe long weekend and not many people tweeting?). That can be really annoying, especially in mobile. I will fix it soon.

You can get similar results if you mute these words in your settings here: https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords

ActivityTweet , generic_activity_highlights , generic_activity_MomentsBreaking , RankedOrganicTweet , suggest_activity , suggest_activity_feed , suggest_activity_Highlights , suggest_activity_tweet , suggest_grouped_tweet_hashtag , suggest_pyle_tweet , suggest_ranked_organic_tweet , suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet , suggest_recap , suggest_recycled_tweet , suggest_recycled_tweet_inline , suggest_sc_tweet , suggest_timeline_tweet , suggest_who_to_follow , suggestactivitytweet , suggestpyletweet , suggestrecycledtweet_inline

Just FYI, I would pay for a native iOS app that is polished enough and looks exactly like this.

I'd second this. Although from memory (and I didn't re-check this so I might be wrong) Twitter's API has quite strict user limits, in order to prevent third party clients from gaining significant marketshare (and thus spoiling their carefully planned curated feed to raise user engagement, with ads injected throughout).

I think that has proved an issue for "alternative" Twitter apps in the past, or at least did for quite a long time.

Yes, this is a problem, especially if the app becomes huge. They also have some strict rate limits. For ex: The endpoint to get mentions is restricted to 100,000 requests per day, which is very less for a popular app. There are ways to get mentions using their search endpoint which has a more lenient rate limit but it is an inconvenience and a bit hacky.

Thank you for the feedback. I wanted to test the waters with a quick web app before building a mobile app.

Check out Tweetlogix. I bought that app, been using it for months now, I like it

Pretty neat! I switch between light and dark mode on all of my devices through the day depending on the lightning situation. I'd love to see the web app to switch automatically, too.

This would be interesting to add. I don't use any JavaScript, so I would have to get the user to set their time zone and the time after which they want to switch.

The prefers-color-scheme CSS media feature could be a way of doing this without requiring any additional action from the user. The spec is still a draft but it has decent browser support.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

Nice job, thanks for bringing it to the world! Was looking for something exactly like that a few weeks back.

Too bad this isn’t the default setup for Twitter! I’d actually use the silly thing in that case

The frustrating part is that even when you change your settings in Twitter to show most recent tweets, it goes back to top tweets in a day or two.

Is there a TweetDelete like service that resets this setting regularly?

I realize it shouldn’t be necessary. I’ve mostly stopped using Twitter, but I ask out of curiosity.

I'm not aware of one. As @eyelidlessness pointed out in the comment above, it seems to change back randomly, so I think it would be hard to detect when it changes.

Mine will stick sometimes for weeks or maybe even months. I think it switches when they push out an update, it's totally unpredictable when it will happen. At least on iOS, it usually notifies me that it's switched so I know I need to switch it back.

It looks pretty much the same as twittering.el - the Emacs package that lets you tweet from your editor. So if you enjoy that kind of aesthetics, the Church of Emacs extends its invitation ;).

Perhaps try https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ ?

The lack of replies seems like it would break tweet-threads entirely?

Honestly I like reading normal-person replies, but at a bare minimum, I would think you need to include self-replies to get most meaningful content through (at least on clickthrough).

I'm planning to add this as a setting in the next increment.

I do see retweets. Anyway if getting rid of them?

Don’t see anything in settings.

Retweets are always off and cannot be changed, so it should not show retweets in home timeline. It could be a bug I missed. I will take a look. Thank you for the heads up.

Example:

David Chapman (@Meaningness):

RT @michael_nielsen: I mention all this mostly because of the relative lack of attention the media in many countries have paid to successes… reply | retweet | favorite | original

That is the old style Retweet before twitter integrated it, those are regular tweets.

Ah, thanks. That helps. Checking David's profile, it is the newer style retweet, which shouldn't have showed up.

Didn't Twitter shut down apps like this in the past? I wonder how long this will last.

Does it support markdown when tweeting

I did not want to request permission to post on behalf of users. With that out of the way, the most minimal way to reply and create new tweets (and even like/retweet) without write permissions is using Twitter's intent feature which opens a (surprisingly) minimal UI for those actions.

Love it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com