With over 3 million customers and plans to open up extra broadly within the months forward, Bluesky continues to be establishing itself as an alternative choice to Twitter/X. Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped the developer group from embracing the undertaking and constructing instruments to satisfy the wants of these fleeing the now Elon Musk–owned social community, previously often known as Twitter. One such undertaking is deck.blue, a Bluesky-flavored model of Twitter’s beloved (although typically ignored) TweetDeck — the latter of which turned a paid service final yr 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 assist for a number of accounts and scheduling of posts.

The deck.blue app, which is presently out there on the net, 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 yr 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 alternate options, Filho discovered that Mastodon already had a TweetDeck-inspired net interface that was first-party constructed and “really fairly good,” he says. However when he examined the choices out there 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 making an attempt 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 best 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 out there to the broader group. That was the case with the launch of hashtags, assist 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 assist for hashtags, which led to a put up concerning the characteristic going viral on Bluesky with 1,500 likes and tons of of reposts. (Bluesky’s definition of viral is far smaller as a result of its restricted viewers, after all.)

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 opponents provide. Up to now, that’s attracted the undertaking 15,000 registered customers, round 1,000 of that are lively day by day.

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

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

“Once they really launch and take away the invite codes . . . I’m afraid of how massive it might get,” he says. “I believe Bluesky is dropping customers by not having invite codes [available]. So as soon as they ditch that, I’m unsure I’ll be capable of hold doing buyer assist alone,” he provides.