Show HN: Turn your tweets/threads into a blog and RSS feed | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Turn your tweets/threads into a blog and RSS feed

typefully.com

56 pointslinuz9017 comments

This is a terribly disconnected pitch… At least for me. I instantly clicked because I’m literally building a replacement to do exactly this for my personal website. So far so good, love the concept, page looks good, can’t tell if I can use my own domain, surely there’s some info, hunt around tor several minutes bouncing between a modal blocked write your tweets here demo page and the threads as blog demo page, no “more info”, no FAQ, no answer to my question, so I’ve bounced in frustration. I’m not putting your domain as my website and I’m sick of using CloudFlare trick redirects to point people to Twitter directly as well, so it’s a “looks nice, but sorry, no sale, you clearly don’t fit my needs” from me.

Good luck though. Seemed like a polished flow that pushed your thread writing tool well, I just have zero need for that, at all, ever, cause I could just automate that with one of the many CLI Twitter tools and a few lines of bash script or Python if I wanted to put some extra polish on it.

Honestly appreciate the feedback. I think we have a few things to address, but especially these two:

- Make our "pitch" better adding more info on our login modal, especially on what exact feature set to expect, and what's behind a paid Pro plan (the Profiles feature is completely free though) - We definitely need to add custom domain support to Profiles, but it was just out of scope for the MVP. I'd love to have it myself, it's high on our list.

Glad to know it’s high on the list. I’d personally be happy paying a small surcharge for it. I’ve looked at making whatever I end up building to solve this need for myself into some kind of SaaS and I’m aware how much of a PITA user provided domains can be with regards to SSL certificates, so I’m not at all surprised it didn’t make the cut on your otherwise nicely polished MVP. (Automatically merging thread / multiple posts definitely isn’t on my own MVP haha)

I hope my feedback didn’t come across too brutal. I’ve just been looking for good replacements for Syte2 as a personal feed aggregator since Atlas mongodb got dropped from the heroku free tier (cause of the mongodb inc buyout) neatly 2 years ago and their and Syte3 got way too complicated with the lambda and dynamo and too much JavaScript for me thanks… I’ve been slowly building my own replacement for literally years since a redirect to Twitter solves 80% of my need (other than visual branding and control) so whenever I come across a product that might solve this, I charge forth eager to hand over money if it’s a good fit, since I know it’s hard work, except every damn one either isn’t ready, is abandoned, is a bespoke enterprise social engagement platform that wants you to “talk to us for pricing. It’s slowly building up a layer of cynicism that’s probably leaking out into how harshly I judge any new product I come across at this point.

But like I said, it is a polished flow to your primary product which looks good but I just have no need for and I’m just a picky customer for your new feature with a specific need you don’t support (yet). The world needs more products to pull some control back from the major social platforms, even if it’s only control over presentation!

At first I thought this would be a service which takes your Twitter profile and turns it into a website with a CMS backend, which sounds like a great idea for anyone who wants to escape Twitter but doesn't have the tech savvy to set up a website and migrate all their old content on their own.

I guess it's not exactly that though, it... creates a profile on typefully.com that mirrors your Twitter account?

Hello, I love that idea, but at this time we want to make the product focused on the experience of Twitter creators, so we feel like it makes sense you make you publish on Twitter and on your Typefully Profile simultaneously.

So yes, it mirrors the content, but you control your Typefully Profile and you get an RSS Feed that you can plug anywhere.

That being said, this is just version 1.0 of Profiles, and we'd love to give users even more control, and possibly allow to publish directly to their Typefully Profile, or export their content easily to other platforms as well.

nitter.net also provides RSS feeds for every Twitter user: https://nitter.net/username/rss

That's true. The core difference here is that Typefully will unroll your threads and you can set a title, so in RSS readers they will show as proper blog posts.

I get my twitter feeds from nitter. Works pretty good. Eg., https://nitter.net/jack/rss

Does Typefully support drafting elsewhere and pasting into your editor? I'm working on a twitter fiction experiment that makes use of pretty long (100+ tweet) threads and I write my drafts in Scrivener. The ability to paste in a bunch of delimited text, and to delete entire previous threads would be amazing.

I realize it's probably not your typical use case

Yes we do.

You can paste any plaintext in our editor and it will be split into tweets. Just put 4 newlines between one tweet and the next.

Cool. What about thread size limitations?

Also, it would be nice if the tweets were trimmed. I just pasted a bunch into your editor and they had an extra newline so all the tweets had whitespace padding at the beginning.

This application will be able to:

    See accounts you follow, mute, and block.
    Follow and unfollow accounts for you.
    Update your profile and account settings.
    Post and delete Tweets for you
    Create, manage, and delete Lists and collections for you.
    Mute, block, and report accounts for you.
    See your email address.

Why?

Hi Jonathan, Typefully is first and foremost a thread-writing app meant for publishing, this is why we need all those permissions.

Profiles could use a subset of permissions, but we prefer to keep things simple and have a unified login flow.

Can I turn others tweets into a blog? Especially one that unspools Twitters Threads so each blogpost contains the entire train of thought?

For some reason lots of people would rather write a 10 or 20 post thread than a blog post and Twitter is terrible at that.

how is this different from Thread Reader?

https://threadreaderapp.com

Hi, Typefully was born as a simple web-based text editor with a preview of how your text will look on Twitter.

While we added many features to empower Twitter creators, at the core it's still a thread writing app, and now users can publish their threads as "unrolled" blog posts.

What makes it fundamentally different is that it's the Typefully user that decides to unroll their posts and share them, and they can preview the unrolled version while writing, so it's optimized for this use case.

Hope this answers your question.

thanks for explanation

based on the materials i didn’t realize you’re also a tweet-writing app

instead i understood the product as a tweet-preview service

maybe you should make clear that typefully is a twitter publishing tool while showing both the editing and the preview capabilities on your marketing page

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