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Twitter ​

Use Simplified Twitter extension with couple css tweaks to hide distracting elements when I browse Twitter on Safari in separate window (with jk keyboard binds to move between tweets, l to like, b to bookmark, r to reply). And official app on iOS.

I love Twitter as it's currently still the best place to stream your thoughts to public and have others interact with it in real time. Nothing yet comes close to the network and UX of Twitter for doing this. Except maybe Elk client for Mastodon.

I have trust Twitter will improve despite questionable past decisions. They will make mistakes, roll things back, learn and adapt. My main concern with Twitter is the lack of transparency around decision making involving suspensions, the amount of bots spamming notifications and DMs and that the code is not open source.

I'd also love it if they could make bookmarking tweets fast on mobile. Ideally by allowing users to swap the view count on tweets in the feed with a bookmark icon similar to what you see when you open a tweet in full view. I often use bookmarks for interesting things I want to see in detail later and it takes too long time to bookmark now. 😞

Also the fact that Twitter still shows your own tweets on your timeline feed is insane to me. Would also love it if you could make the badge on notification icon to only show the number for new replies.

I'd also love for something like Nostr or Farcaster protocols to power a service like Twitter with all the UX niceness that Twitter has. Decentralization has its issues but I think in the long term, a true public web square should be in the power of the community.

I love the idea of freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach whereby anyone can have a voice but the platform won't boost hurtful or perhaps verifiably incorrect rhetoric. Twitter's Community Notes is great in that regard. Will see how Twitter fares at making this work.

Mastodon is interesting alternative but needs smoother onboarding, client UX and ability to have 'public likes' for it to ever make me want to use it more. I get a lot of my content from seeing likes of people I admire. Not to mention that with Mastodon, you still have to follow the rules of the server you joined, otherwise you get suspended with all content deleted same as Twitter. That said, Elk client is gorgeous. And shows how much innovation can happen if all development was not done behind closed doors.

I am trying to build my own app with a network of people that's based on sharing your learnings and ideas. You would be able to share notes, ideas in similar way I do here in this wiki but more streamlined. With everything being open source.

I dislike that Twitter gives you no tools to actually build some kind of knowledge system off your own or other's tweets. A dream Twitter like network in my eyes would treat knowledge as first class thing, from which you can share parts or all of your knowledge with all or 'publish/tweet' parts of it out to your followers. But also have a place to catalogue, share and collaborate on ideas together.

Twitter will always have a special place and it will be hard to beat it at what it does best despite the fact that it's not transparent and not open source. But will see. TikTok showed that it's possible to disrupt even such giant networks if you position/market your product well.

As mentioned before, Twitter not being open source is horrible. I find it frustrating that Twitter iOS client doesn't have the ability to long press like icon to bookmark. If the code was open source, I would have gladly made PR for this already. For some reason non official Twitter clients have worse UX feed content so moving from official clients is a non solution for me. It'd also be great if when you visit Twitter profile, it would tell you instantly if that person is added to a list of yours.

In many ways it's a matter of time that Twitter gets replaced with an open source transparent protocol that mimics all the UX features of Twitter. Innovate or die.

Official Twitter TS SDK is nice for building things on top of Twitter.

How does Twitter work is nice overview of Twitter tech.

Bird SQL is nice way to search Twitter.

CSS code to clean up Twitter ​

I use Simplified Twitter to clean up many things.

On top of the extension, I use Cascadea extension to on Safari to hide some remaining annoying/distracting elements with CSS selectors. Code for it below.

It hides badges on the notification icon, view counts on tweets, 'new tweets' banner and few more things.

Final result should look like this.

css
[aria-label="1 unread items"] {
  display: none;
}
[aria-label="2 unread items"] {
  display: none;
}
[aria-label="3 unread items"] {
  display: none;
}
[aria-label="4 unread items"] {
  display: none;
}
[aria-label="5 unread items"] {
  display: none;
}
[aria-label="6 unread items"] {
  display: none;
}
[aria-label="7 unread items"] {
  display: none;
}
[aria-label="undefined unread items"] {
  display: none;
}
[aria-label="Home"] {
  display: none;
}
[aria-label="New Tweets are available. Push the period key to go to the them."] {
  display: none;
}
article[data-testid="tweet"] div:has(> a[aria-label*="View Tweet analytics"]) {
  display: none;
}

Interesting hash tags ​

Notes ​