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 :)
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 can't be bothered. If they want to censor me that's their prerogative. I'm not paying to shitpost here, and I'm not getting paid to be here either; I'm just a guest.
No matter what you do, Kizie will be worthless as long as it depends on Twitter. Twitter is nothing but the men's room wall of the internet. Its content is nothing but variations on the following theme:
Here I sit, brokenhearted / I came to shit and only farted
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.
Nobody elected you moderator, let alone arbiter of constructive commentary. I don't answer to you, and I'm certainly not here for your edification.
Besides, HN isn't a community. It's a groupthink incubator where overprivileged techies who weren't bullied enough as children simp for billionaires and VCs. Newsflash: senpai will never notice you.
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.
> Regardless of differing political opinions and objectives, this comment comes off as unnecessarily aggressive and infers OP's tool is useless.
I suppose I must be more explicit, then, since you took my previous post as mere inference. Did you perhaps mean 'implication', by the way?
In my opinion OP's tool is useless. We already have an alternative self-hostable front-end for Twitter — Nitter — that works reasonably well as long as you don't run into Twitter's API rate limits. OP is just reinventing the wheel and since they're no friend of mine I see no reason to sugarcoat it for them.
> I really wish stuff like this wasn't on Hacker News.
Your wish is not my command. If the mod team wants to ban me, that's their prerogative, but until they do I will continue to speak from the heart. If my heart is too basaltic for you, that's your problem.
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
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.
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.
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
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 :)
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!
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.
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.
Twitter is like the rest of Silicon Valley: there's nothing wrong with it that can't be fixed by doing things Ellen Ripley's way. (It's the only way to be sure.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
92 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 65.4 ms ] thread--
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!
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.
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
Here I sit, brokenhearted / I came to shit and only farted
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.
Besides, HN isn't a community. It's a groupthink incubator where overprivileged techies who weren't bullied enough as children simp for billionaires and VCs. Newsflash: senpai will never notice you.
I suppose I must be more explicit, then, since you took my previous post as mere inference. Did you perhaps mean 'implication', by the way?
In my opinion OP's tool is useless. We already have an alternative self-hostable front-end for Twitter — Nitter — that works reasonably well as long as you don't run into Twitter's API rate limits. OP is just reinventing the wheel and since they're no friend of mine I see no reason to sugarcoat it for them.
> I really wish stuff like this wasn't on Hacker News.
Your wish is not my command. If the mod team wants to ban me, that's their prerogative, but until they do I will continue to speak from the heart. If my heart is too basaltic for you, that's your problem.
This will include maths and lots of data processing but it'll eventually be there in Kizie at some point
If you have feedback please let me know via Twitter DM
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.
Your suggestion on tweets from insightful people is interesting, I can see Twitter lists can do that too, I'll think about it, thanks.
What do you think is beautiful about the UI? What other beautiful UIs inspired your design?
But if you think it's not then sure please let me know your definition of "beautiful", I'll try to work on it :)
If possible, can you please DM me the console screenshot at https:/twitter.com/thelifeofrishi
- 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
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 :).
- 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 :)
But the others might still be useful for some!
{"message":"Rate limit exceeded","code":88,"allErrors":[{"message":"Rate limit exceeded","code":88}],"twitterReply":{"errors":[{"message":"Rate limit exceeded","code":88}]},"statusCode":429}
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 :)
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 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 :)
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.
PS. This is indeed in Firefox with uBlock set to block all domains except for kizie.co, edgecastcdn.net and twimg.com.
Firefox strict privacy setting completely blocks twitter CDN urls, no way to fix it I suppose.
Thanks for taking the extra effort, appreciated :)
Please consider making a graceful fallback to an actual website even if it's only to tell non-JS users to go away.
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
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?
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 :)
"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?
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.
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
I am also a designer :), all custom components based on Tailwind