All 100 ideasReading and news
#78 of 100 · Reading and news
Read social posts without the app
A read-only view that turns tweet threads into prose, shows chosen people's posts in order without an account, across Twitter, Mastodon and others.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay9%
- Want it local or private0%
- Object to subscriptions0%
- Want it open source or self-hosted0%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 11 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Tried, never finished2 Show HN launches do part of this. None does the whole job.
Instead of: Nitter, Twitter, Mastodon, Feedly
The idea, as matched
A clean, chronological, read-only front end for Twitter/X, Mastodon or Facebook posts that unrolls threads into readable text and gathers chosen people's posts across platforms without the main app.
Jev first matched 13 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 11 of 13.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Thread unrolling and Nitter replacement are the main asks.
- Aug 2024Wants a way to convert a Twitter thread into flowing paragraph text. Read it: a comment in “You don't understand math, and what to do about it”
- Mar 2024Wants a working Nitter alternative to read Twitter feeds chronologically without an account. Read it: a comment in “Twstalker.com as a Twitter alternative front end”
- Dec 2022Wants a Nitter-style plain HTML reader for Mastodon posts. Read it: a comment in “How to Befriend Crows”
- Jun 2021Wants an HN-style aggregator of tweets from favorite topics and people. Read it: a comment in “Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web”
- Feb 2021Wants a curated way to read good Twitter content without the rage. Read it: a comment in “Quitting Twitter”
- Jan 2021Wants a service that converts Twitter threads into HN or Reddit-style threaded pages. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Could plain old RSS be a replacement for Twitter?”
- Apr 2020Wants a Twitter frontend that loads a whole conversation at once, like HN or old Reddit. Read it: a comment in “Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries”
- Oct 2019Wants a simple syndication system to build a friends list and receive their content. Read it: a comment in “U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them”
- Aug 2018Wants a service that turns tweet chains into readable letter-style text. Read it: a comment in “Fraud in superconductor physics”
- Feb 2017Asks for a service aggregating posts from multiple social networks, blogs and Patreon. Read it: a comment in “Wall Street Is Giving Up On Twitter”
- Jan 2014Would pay for a Twitter app that filters out noise so they can read what matters. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: What will you pay for?”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.