Show HN: Kizie – Twitter for web, reimagined | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kizie – Twitter for web, reimagined

kizie.co

Hi fellow misfits, I'm Rishi(https://twitter.com/thelifeofrishi), I have been working on a better version of Twitter at https://kizie.co, let me know what you think

Tech

Next.js, Vercel, Supabase, Tailwind, ah yep that's pretty much it

Why?

Because Twitter.com is cluttered, has ads that no one likes, lacks UX and can be better, Kizie.co intends to fix all of these.

Whats' in Kizie.co that Twitter.com doesn't have?

- Undo tweet, you get time to discard/re-send last sent tweet

- Analytics, you get stats of your tweets so you know which tweets are working and to increase engagement

- Quick media preview, preview photos/videos in feeds in full aspect ratio quickly on hover, Twitter.com is still trying to fix the issue :D

- Reader mode for links, my personal favorite, links in your timeline can be viewed in a beautiful reader view in the app itself

- Save links for later

- Plus Kizie has almost all of the Twitter.com features

- Me

---

I'm the only one working on it, and so I assure you there can be bugs in the app :D, if you come across one just let me know on Twitter.

I have been constantly using Kizie on Web and through macOS app since last couple months now and I think it's good and stable enough for daily use at this moment. I've been also constantly working on UX and adding useful features, currently a tool to convert Tweet to image - https://kizie.co/tweet-image (standalone rn but will be available for Pro users and could be used from the feeds). Have bunch of ideas to go live :)

That's it, let me know what you think of it!

How do you feel the engagement metrics will play out? They make me worried. Also, kudos for making this!

Since I haven't dived fully into it I am not sure how it'll turn out, my idea with engagement context is to show users what's working for them and whats' not so they know how to do it

This will include maths and lots of data processing but it'll eventually be there in Kizie at some point

All you're doing is putting lipstick on a pig. This isn't even a better Nitter <https://nitter.net/about>.

If you want to do something useful, I'd like to see you create a Twitter look-alike that pulls from members' RSS/Atom/JSON feeds rather than letting them post directly. No likes, no reshares, no comments. Just pure feed aggregation in reverse chronological order like the Demiurge intended.

We need more webrings and sites like Nightfall City <https://nightfall.city/>, not FOSS developers reskinning a parasocial media site and not getting a dime in payment.

I know it's not as good as nitter(didn't know about it)

But I'm trying :), I see nitter has 22 contributors, Kizie has only one person working, give me some time I'll make it as better as I can

Comments like yours are such a stain to the community. If you have nothing constructive to say, keep it to yourself.

They're not wrong. What even is this? A monetised front for Twitter? Not even it's own site? It's garbage, sites like this are the 'stain to the community', not the people pointing it out.

What an incredible take. So we should never build alternative UI’s for X? It always has to be original software in every regard?

Unreal, get out of here with your bottom of the barrel thinking. Don’t trash on someone’s work because you lack creative thinking. It’s pathetic and unwanted.

You seem to be kind of shadowban (not sure what the proper term is), you might want to write an email to the hn moderation to clear that up

Regardless of differing political opinions and objectives, this comment comes off as unnecessarily aggressive and infers OP's tool is useless. I really wish stuff like this wasn't on Hacker News.

I don't see anything about tools to deal with harassment and trolls. Any online platform, especially public or semi-public ones, will have to deal with it. I wonder what you have done.

The only feature that'll help with this issue in Kizie is "Muted Words" but Twitter has that too.

Thanks for pointing out the problem, the focus haven't been there but I see the problem, I've noted it and will plan for it. Thanks :)

Looks like twitter isn't happy about all the users viewing your page:

{"message":"Rate limit exceeded","code":88,"allErrors":[{"message":"Rate limit exceeded","code":88}],"twitterReply":{"errors":[{"message":"Rate limit exceeded","code":88}]},"statusCode":429}

There's too much traffic on the site right now because of this post, it should be back in a couple of minutes :)

How will you manage this if you get widespread adoption/use?

Actually it was an issue where I was making API request for the homepage for rendering some tweets, huge traffic caused the reach to limit, bad decision, it's fixed now :)

I understand. I was assuming that you were also using the Twitter API for the product itself, such that rate-limiting would affect API requests at some point as you scale up your users.

Signed in users use user's keys so each user has it's own rate-limit separate from the app context.

And yes, you're right, there are rate-limits for endpoints in Twitter API, I've optimized the app to be in rate-limits and still be able to make the most of it.

For ex. I recently added Messages in Kizie. Twitter API's Messages endpoint has a rate-limit of 15 requests per 15 min window. Really really low for something like messages. On top of that each request returns at most 50 messages(not conversations).

How Kizie handles it is it makes 3 requests on initial load and then checks for new messages every 2.5 minutes. It was kinda tricky to do all of it reliably and I'm still trying optimise it more for better experience :)

Ah, understood. I asked because years ago I played with the Twitter API a bit and found its rate limits pretty restrictive, so was wondering if that had changed or, if not, how you were working around it.

Hopefully your users will get tons of value from the other improvements, such that these small trade-offs you have to make for rate limits are insignificant to the overall UX upgrade.

Best of luck on customer acquisition, and congrats on what you've built thus far--no small thing for a one person operation!

Thanks, appreciate it :)

You could actually store the tweet contents yourself and render them to look like the Twitter UI. That would help to not get rate limited.

That's exactly how I fixed the rate-limit issue on landing page :)

I hope Twitter won't ruin this.

That's one of the best things I've heard about Kizie :)

This looks great, solid list of features.

I use Tweetbot and have done for many years, mostly because of a feature set like this. Is Kizie intending to compete with other third-party clients, or is it intending to target platforms like the web/Android where established apps like Tweetbot aren't available?

Thanks!

Kizie isn't intending to compete with any other app, it's intended to be user's Twitter app with flawless experience, if there's any feature that could possibly uplift your Twitter experience then I want to add that in Kizie, possibly on multiple platforms too :)

Nope. It's about equal to modern twitter. All I get is a blank screen indicating you want me to execute untrusted code from your domain. Twitter at least tells me that it's blocking me intentionally for not running it's code though.

I'm an indie dev. who built this on weekends, 200 active visitors gets me excited, taking users data and selling it to someone doesn't :)

It's not that I don't trust you specifically. I have no reason to monetize my interactions with you either but would you run an executable email attachment if I sent one to you?

Please consider making a graceful fallback to an actual website even if it's only to tell non-JS users to go away.

Are you comparing running a random exe file with executing javascript on the web?

Makes sense :)

I suspect it's not supposed to look like this - https://i.imgur.com/hX6YMgb.png

It's not, might be adblocker or Firefox strict setting.

I have the same thing in Firefox. FWIW, I don't generally turn them off for new products that I'm not familiar with so if I hadn't come from this thread on HN I would probably have bailed out in a few seconds.

An update - It renders OK now, without making any changes to the setup on my end.

PS. This is indeed in Firefox with uBlock set to block all domains except for kizie.co, edgecastcdn.net and twimg.com.

uBlock and some other adblockers might block twitter URLs, I had issue with 1Blocker app as well which I discussed with their team and is now fixed.

Firefox strict privacy setting completely blocks twitter CDN urls, no way to fix it I suppose.

Thanks for taking the extra effort, appreciated :)

I have this issue too, with Chrome on Android and a DNS adblocker. Might be the image host or it doesn't load for a different reason

Can you please try opening https://kizie/co/YOUR_TWITTER_HANDLE and report what you see, thanks in advance!

Blank in all cases for me. With adblocker enabled/disabled. With Dark Reader enabled/disabled. On the homepage vs /my_twitter_handle. In Chrome, Edge, Firefox.

I'm in Australia. I see no errors in the developer console, or the network tab. Inspecting element reveals a bunch of divs, with no meaningful content (essentially empty) in the middle.

All images coming from Twitter are broken. Firefox is counting images coming from https://pbs.twimg.com/ as trackers and stopping the load. This is with Enhanced Tracking Protection turned on. You can confirm this by clicking on the shield in the address bar, then clicking on Social Media Trackers.

Yeah that's a known issue and happens on any app that used Twitter API when Firefox enhanced protection is enabled, it would work on balanced settings.

I am the original complainer and https://kizie.co/spacex renders perfectly fine.

i turned the dns blocker off and now it works

Hey Rishi, The Landing page was pretty blank (the twitter embed part) when NextDNS is enabled. I think any other AdBlockers will block it. You might want to check it out.

Thanks for reporting, it doesn't use Twitter's script but the API data, thought what you're saying is possible

If possible, can you please DM me the console screenshot at https:/twitter.com/thelifeofrishi

I read the feature list and I don't really see anything that is not already on the standard twitter web ui. What are the actual addition feature-wise?

Hi, Twitter.com doesn't have these, I literally checked like 20 seconds back :)

- Undo tweet, you get time to discard/re-send last sent tweet - Analytics, you get stats of your tweets so you know which tweets are working and to increase engagement - Quick media preview, preview photos/videos in feeds in full aspect ratio quickly on hover, Twitter.com is still trying to fix the issue :D - Reader mode for links, my personal favorite, links in your timeline can be viewed in a beautiful reader view in the app itself - Save links for later

You can enable analytics on the standard twitter website though.

But the others might still be useful for some!

Okay for undo/redo. I mean, I can delete and repost a tweet with correction, but the UI isn't made for that. However I have statistics on Twitter, for each tweet individually or for my timeline globally with top tweets per view/engagements etc per period of time.

I think I understand better what you call "media preview", I guess that can be useful for some.

The remaining features you listed are features that I want from my browser (which has them) not from the app, but that's also a matter of personal preferences I guess :).

- Undo/redo comment, I agree but Kizie makes it easier.

- Statistics, twitter only shows per tweet, Kizie(makes it better) gives it all in single place, and its' going to have insights soon(per period, engagement data, which tweets worked etc.)

Thanks, even if it solves some and not all problems I am happy with it. It's a continuous effort to add things and make existing stuff stable

If there's something you've always wanted out of Twitter then let me know, would be happy to add :)

Okay :). For stats, I'm not sure I understand what you listed that I cannot already have using https://analytics.twitter.com/.

Right now nothing, but there will be engagement insights based on this data

It takes balls to launch something that depends 100% on Twitter. What's to stop them from cutting you off at whatever whim they have?

I was prepared for that even before I started work on Kizie, nothing to lose :)

> a beautiful reader mode UI

What do you think is beautiful about the UI? What other beautiful UIs inspired your design?

Less clutter, simple is beautiful I guess if I may say so as a maker

But if you think it's not then sure please let me know your definition of "beautiful", I'll try to work on it :)

It's cool and in fact "pretty", but I think you need some sort of visual "demarcation" between posts.

Noted, I've been feeling it too lately, will work on it :)

While the people from the US or Japan might not agree, the only way to improve Twitter is to delete it.

This is a bit of a HN cliche. Twitter can be great as long as you stay away from the toxic threads and you know when to switch off. I use it to banter about football and the like.

I love Twitter

what context am I missing for mentioning Japan in this context?

Is this a one man project? How did you go about design? Existing component library of some sort?

Yes, solo founder.

I am also a designer :), all custom components based on Tailwind

The edit feature, i think is problematic. Imagine you post something, X people liked it, then you edit the post changing the whole meaning of the message and the people that liked it before changes are still be there.. liking it. That's problematic IMO, when people get canceled because they liked something on Twitter, that they actually didn't.

Kizie doesn't edit your existing tweets, even Twitter doesn't/can't do that :D

Kizie just makes it easier to discard/redo your last sent tweet within 10 seconds of posting it, before implementing I thought it wouldn't be useful but I've personally used it plenty of times. It does help, try it out and let me know maybe

Twitter do not allow editing in their API, so all this app is doing is _not posting it_ for a short period of time after you click submit to allow you to edit if you need to. No one will see the tweet until that time period is over.

Did you get this information from:

"Undo or redo a tweet Discard your last tweet or re-edit it, quickly with shortcuts" or are you just guessing it based on the twitter API?

Neither, it's just fairly clear to me that this is not the sort of feature that a third party client to a service can typically implement if there is no support for it in the official client (completely separate from this being Twitter).

As another example, Gmail has an "undo" button on sending an email, but other email clients don't (mostly). Why? Because email doesn't have the concept of un-doing a send, so the only way they can implement this at the "protocol level" is to... not, and to implement it entirely in the client with a delay.

It is well known that Twitter does not allow editing tweets. Any apps that ostensibly do that are simply delaying the tweet or deleting and reposting it.

You're absolutely right :)

I guess this is why twitter doesn't allow edits. I never thought about it this way.

I believe Twitter also relies on read only Tweets as a performance optimisation.

I'll try it, Twitter is impossible to browse sequentially.

thanks :)

If you have feedback please let me know via Twitter DM

Sure, you can have my money just by making reading better e.g. -

List of who I'm following is basically buried, if I had a couple of "balloons" at the top of the feed with top 5- 10 people I follow (according to some algorithm) and I can click then read, some sort of that would be swell.

I don't care about the general feed, I care about insightful people, currently it's easier for me to do it via bookmarks of select profiles, that's my twitter client.

I've focussed on making reading experience better, try it out :)

Your suggestion on tweets from insightful people is interesting, I can see Twitter lists can do that too, I'll think about it, thanks.

Would be useful for me if this supports lists.

Lists is on plan, will be there in the next update :)

That would be cool :)

Also, I feel like there seems to be a lag when clicking on the tabs. Currently using it on Mobile Safari iOS 15. Maybe I'm expecting native-like perf or something :D

The thought of creating Kizie iOS app has crossed my mind like 23 times :D, someday

How is this platform making impossible to censor users guaranteeing freedom of expression?

This is just a frontend client for Twitter, that's like asking how a frontend client for Hacker News allows you to bypass dang and moderators; it doesn't.

That's too in-the-box thinking in my mind. The product could use Twitter as a starting point of something and have things that can't be Twitter controlled by the platform itself. Namely, protect owned responses there that Twitter would be eager to censor. Being a microphone for those who were excluded.

How would it do that? It uses the Twitter API, it's not its own service, it's a client.

That wasn't in the roadmap till now, I'll think about it but it's little hard to achieve this since Twitter controls the data here :)

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