This post will be the second —and last, I think— part of my "Better TweetDeck post-mortem" series. In this part, I will try to recount the history of Better TweetDeck as well as shout out people who have helped me with the project. You might learn a thing or two even if you used it for years!

A timeline of Better TweetDeck

As it turns out, trying to recall and tell 9 years of history of a project without prior notes is kinda hard! Who knew! And I think most of it would be boring, as the bulk of my changelogs aren't particularly interesting. So, rather than go through every single release, I will try to do a "best highlights" retelling of what the project went through. If you want to follow along, I have put together a copy of the full changelog of (almost) every tagged version of Better TweetDeck right here.

A bunch of JS and CSS put together

December 2013

I was a student at the time, finishing up my last year of university, living at my parents' place. Unfortunately, we lived in the countryside and that mean we had a terribly slow internet connection. I'm talking less than 1Mbps slow. It wasn't great! But it was manageable.

While I can't remember what prompted me to start using TweetDeck specifically (this was after the acquisition by Twitter). I do remember being extremely annoyed at having to wait for t.co (Twitter's URL shortener) when clicking on. Every. Single. Link. Somehow, this domain is still the slowest domain I regularly encounter, and it was slow at the time already!

At that point, I had been learning web development for a few years, which made me think that surely there was a way to fix this with a userscript…Read more

Welp, here we are. As I write this, it seems TweetDeck is heading toward the paywall^[1], so I decided to discontinue Better TweetDeck.

If you've been using it, I'm sure you have many questions on your mind. Some of which I've answered in the past already on my various accounts, but I feel they deserve to be all answered in the same place.

Can't you support the new TweetDeck?

Yes and no. I looked into supporting the new TweetDeck back in 2022 and found that the way it was built makes it very hard to build on top of it (more on that later). It's not impossible, of course, and maybe someone else would figure it out, but after spending 8 (at this point) years working on Better TweetDeck, I didn't want to start from scratch on top of a completely new base.

That's also when I started entertaining the idea of making my own 3rd party web client for Twitter (and possibly Mastodon), which I believe could have been interesting. But then Elon Musk acquired Twitter and jacked up the API pricing, which killed that idea in the nub 😬

But why can't you support it?

This part is going to be kind of technical, so buckle up!

If you ever used it, you probably noticed that New TweetDeck looks and feels a lot like Twitter Web. It isn't a coincidence. That is because, on a technical level, it IS Twitter Web But With Columns. From Twitter's point of view, this is a net positive because it means that features added to Twitter Web are easily ported to TweetDeck. For Better TweetDeck? Not so much. Like I said above, it would mean throwing everything I wrote and start again, which frankly is kind of depressing…Read more