With over 3 million customers and plans to open up extra broadly within the months forward, Bluesky remains to be establishing itself as a substitute for Twitter/X. Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped the developer neighborhood from embracing the undertaking and constructing instruments to fulfill the wants of these fleeing the now Elon Musk–owned social community, previously often called Twitter. One such undertaking is deck.blue, a Bluesky-flavored model of Twitter’s beloved (although usually ignored) TweetDeck — the latter of which grew to become a paid service final 12 months and has been rebranded as X Professional.

With deck.blue, Bluesky customers can view posts on the social community within the column-based format popularized by TweetDeck, together with issues like their dwelling timeline, notifications, likes, lists, and even customized feeds. They’ll additionally reap the benefits of options like help for a number of accounts and scheduling of posts.

The deck.blue app, which is at the moment obtainable on the internet, was constructed by 25-year-old Gildásio Filho, a São Paulo, Brazil–primarily based software program engineer who, by day, works on the music collaboration app Indaband. He’s teamed up with Japanese developer Shinya Kato, who handles extra of the back-end infrastructure and works with the API.

Filho explains that the concept for deck.blue happened final 12 months when he obtained locked out of TweetDeck after X started charging for the service.

“I made a promise to myself that if I ever obtained kicked out, I’d construct my very own,” he says, referring to TweetDeck.

Surveying the panorama of Twitter options, Filho discovered that Mastodon already had a TweetDeck-inspired net interface that was first-party constructed and “truly fairly good,” he says. However when he examined the choices obtainable to Bluesky customers, he was dissatisfied with the experiences that had been constructed to this point. None mirrored the TweetDeck expertise he was used to from Twitter.

“And, for me to begin utilizing Bluesky, I would want a TweetDeck. I can’t use it with out it, it simply doesn’t work,” Filho admits, echoing the complaints from many former Twitter energy customers when attempting to change to new platforms.

Picture Credit: deck.blue screenshot

The deck.blue undertaking started final August and inside a month of writing the primary line of code, it launched. Initially, the app was known as Bluesky Deck, however Bluesky recommended that utilizing Bluesky within the app’s title wasn’t the precise transfer. So Filho renamed the app deck.blue and employed a designer to work on the branding.

Since its launch, deck.blue has been fast to tack on new options as quickly as (and even earlier than) Bluesky makes them obtainable to the broader neighborhood. That was the case with the launch of hashtags, help for lists, and the launch of the app’s scheduling characteristic, for instance. Notably, deck.blue was among the many first third-party apps so as to add help for hashtags, which led to a publish concerning the characteristic going viral on Bluesky with 1,500 likes and a whole lot of reposts. (Bluesky’s definition of viral is far smaller as a consequence of its restricted viewers, in fact.)

Whereas there are different apps that provide scheduling for Bluesky, Threads, X and different social networks, like fedica and Postpone, deck.blue is aiming extra at an influence consumer viewers, not social media managers who want the analytics and reporting rivals supply. To this point, that’s attracted the undertaking 15,000 registered customers, round 1,000 of that are energetic every day.

Now that deck.blue is extra absolutely developed, Filho is trying to generate a bit of additional revenue to help the undertaking after having added multi-account help, on-line sync, and Patreon integration a couple of months in the past. On Patreon, loyal customers can help the app at charges of anyplace from $2 to $7 per 30 days — costs that undercut TweetDeck, which now requires an X Premium or Premium+ subscription ($8 per 30 days and up).

Although Bluesky’s consumer base is dramatically smaller than X’s, Filho is betting on a future the place it prospers.

“After they truly launch and take away the invite codes . . . I’m afraid of how huge it may get,” he says. “I feel Bluesky is shedding customers by not having invite codes [available]. So as soon as they ditch that, I’m undecided I’ll be capable to preserve doing buyer help by myself,” he provides.