With over 3 million users and plans to roll out more in the coming months, Bluesky continues to establish itself as a Twitter/X alternative. However, that hasn’t stopped the developer community from embracing the project and creating tools to meet the needs of those leaving the social network now owned by Elon Musk, formerly known as Twitter. Such a work it is deck.bluea Bluesky-flavored version of Twitter’s beloved (though often overlooked) TweetDeck — the latter of which became a paid service last year and was renamed X Pro.
With deck.blue, Bluesky users can view posts on the social network in the columnar 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 support for multiple accounts and scheduling posts.
The deck.blue app, which is currently available online, was built by a 25-year-old Gildasio Filhoa software engineer based in São Paulo, Brazil, who works daily on the music collaboration app Indaband. He has teamed up with Japanese developer Shinya Kato, who handles most of the back-end infrastructure and API work.
Filho explains that the idea for deck.blue came about last year when he was locked out of TweetDeck after X started charging for the service.
“I promised myself that if I ever got kicked out, I would make my own,” he says, referring to TweetDeck.
Surveying the landscape of Twitter alternatives, Filho found that Mastodon already had a web interface inspired by TweetDeck built by early builders and “really, really good,” he says. But when he looked at the options available to Bluesky users, he was unhappy with the experiences that had been created so far. None mirror the TweetDeck experience he was used to from Twitter.
“And, to start using Bluesky, I would need a TweetDeck. I can’t use it without it, it just doesn’t work,” admits Filho, echoing the complaints of many former Twitter power users when trying to switch to new platforms.
Image Credits: deck.blue screenshot
The deck.blue project started last August and within a month of writing the first line of code, it was up and running. Originally, the app was called Bluesky Deck, but Bluesky suggested that using Bluesky in the app name wasn’t the right move. So Filho renamed the deck.blue app and hired a designer to work on it brand name.
Since its release, deck.blue has been quick to tackle new features as soon as (or even before) Bluesky makes them available to the wider community. This happened with its inception hashtags, support for listsand its initiation application programmability, for example. In particular, deck.blue was one of 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 narrower because of its limited audience, of course.)
While there are other apps that offer programming for Bluesky, Threads, X and other social networks like Fedica and Postpone, deck.blue is aimed more at a power user audience rather than social media managers who need the analytics and reports offered by competitors. To date, this has attracted the project 15,000 registered users, about 1,000 of whom are active daily.
Now that deck.blue is more fully developed, Filho wants to generate some extra income to support the project after having added multi-account support, online sync and Patreon integration a few months ago. On Patreon, loyal users can support the app with prices ranging from $2 to $7 per month — prices that are lower than TweetDeck, which now requires an X Premium or Premium+ subscription ($8 per month and up).
Although Bluesky’s user base is dramatically smaller than X’s, Filho is betting on a future where it will flourish.
“When they launch and actually remove the invite codes . . . I’m afraid of how big it could get,” he says. “I think Bluesky is losing users because they don’t have invite codes [available]. So once they drop that, I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue doing customer support on my own,” he adds.
