With over 3 million users and plans to open up more widely in the coming months, Bluesky continues to establish itself as an alternative to Twitter/X. However, this has not stopped the developer community from embracing the project and building the tools necessary to meet the needs of those fleeing the social network now owned by Elon Musk, formerly known as Twitter. One of these projects is ship surface. Bluea Bluesky-flavored version of Twitter’s beloved (though often overlooked) TweetDeck — the latter of which became a paid service last year and was rebranded as X Pro.
With Deck.blue, Bluesky users can view posts on the social network in the column-based format popularized by TweetDeck, including things like their home timeline, notifications, likes, lists, or even custom feeds. They can also take advantage of features like multiple account support and post scheduling.
The Deck.blue app, which is currently available on the web, was created by a 25-year-old Gildacio Filhois a software engineer based in São Paulo, Brazil who works daily on a music collaboration app indaband. He’s teamed up with Japanese developer Shinya Kato, who handles more of the back-end infrastructure and works with the application programming interface (API).
Filho explains that the idea for Deck.blue came last year when he was locked out of TweetDeck after X started charging for the service.
“I made a promise to myself that if I got fired, I would build my own site,” he says, referring to TweetDeck.
By scanning the Twitter alternatives scene, Filho found that Mastodon already had one Web interface inspired by TweetDeck It was created by the first party and is “actually very good,” he says. But when he examined the options available to Bluesky users, he was dissatisfied with the experiences that had been built so far. And none of it mirrored the TweetDeck experience he was accustomed to from Twitter.
“And to start using Bluesky, I’ll need TweetDeck. “I can’t use it without it, it doesn’t work,” Filho admits, echoing the complaints of many former Twitter users when trying to switch to new platforms.
The Deck.blue project started last August, and within a month of writing the first line of code, it was launched. Initially, the app was called Bluesky Deck, but Bluesky suggested that using Bluesky in the app name wasn’t the right move. This is how he has fun Rename it The Deck.Blue app I hired a designer to work on Trademarks.
Since its launch, Deck.blue has been quick to add new features as soon as (or even before) Bluesky makes them available to the broader community. This was the case with the launch Hashtags, List supportand launch Application scheduling feature, For example. Notably, Deck.Blue was among the first third-party apps to add support for hashtags, which It led to a post about the feature going viral on Bluesky with 1,500 likes and hundreds of reposts. (Bluesky’s definition of viral is much smaller given its limited audience, of course.)
While there are other apps that provide scheduling for Bluesky, Threads, X, and other social networks, e.g Vedika And Postpone, Deck.blue targets a strong audience of users, not social media managers who need the analytics and reporting offered by competitors. To date, the project has attracted 15,000 registered users, about 1,000 of whom are active daily.
Now that Deck.blue is fully developed, Filho is looking forward to generating a little extra income to support the project next After adding multi-account support, Online sync and Patreon integration a few months ago. On Patreon, loyal users can support the app for prices ranging from $2 to $7 per month — prices that undercut the cost of TweetDeck, which is now Requires X Premium or Premium+ subscription ($8 per month and up).
Although Bluesky’s user base is significantly smaller than X’s, Filho is betting on a future in which it will thrive.
“When they actually turn on and remove invite codes…I’m afraid of how big it could get,” he says. “I think Bluesky is losing users because of the lack of invite codes [available]. “So once they give that up, I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue providing customer support on my own,” he adds.