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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

For the ones among us who are not familiar with foone yet:

They only post on Twitter because blogging doesn't work for them [0]. The Twitter thread UI sucks and that's unfortunate but somewhat unavoidable in this case. I still prefer it to not getting any of foone's "weird hardware" discussions at all.

You might have to click "Show thread/more" if you do not see all of the posts. Or just run the post through a website like threadreaderapp, it will collect follow-up posts by the same user and compile it into a page similiar to a blog post.

[0] https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128

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Please don't introduce this off-topic issue into the threads - it's a classic flamewar topic and extremely predictable, and we should just all avoid it.

Wow, that is interesting. You can almost tell if he gets up between each Tweet and walks around to filter out his thoughts in order to push it into one single new tweet. There might come a new Tweet or not, each one expands the thought of the chain, but the chain by itself wouldn't be broken if he'd just had stopped tweeting at any point.

A very attractive "blogging model".

Up to this point the 1/4, 2/4, ... tweets were what defined my aversion to these chains.

It's like when you remember one thing after the fact and get annoyed that it's too late, but in his case it's never too late.

They, not he.

I was referring to https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128 sorry to not make it clear.

Parent was referring to the fact that Foone uses they/them pronouns (it's in their Twitter profile).

Yes, me too. See the sidebar: "(they/them)".

Ooh, I see. Thanks for pointing this out.

Twitter's user interface is as bad as New Reddit.

But at least with Reddit, you can still use Old Reddit (https://old.reddit.com/).

Can anybody recommend a Twitter frontend that's as information dense as Old Reddit?

The awful user-interface is the only thing stopping me using Twitter.

I think nitter is probably the best alternative. It's a bit more dense, no js, so not quite Old Reddit but still way better

The thread on nitter: https://nitter.net/Foone/status/1423078973064441858

Can’t say I see a big difference.

Yeah, every post having an image doesn't help, but the same username/avatar repeated so much is a lot of noise too. If the point of a thread is 'microblogging' then it really needs third-party replies removed, and not such repetition.

Thread Reader.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1423078973064441858.html

It's not making you look at the thread through a three post window where if you don't change tweet every so often you end up seeing replies rather than the continuation?

You could use their timeline, but that presents different challenges, i.e. the order is reversed and other content is intermingled.

Tweetdeck works well if you use lists in Twitter. It allows you to create a column for each list. Each column is pretty information dense, and with lists I can have a local news column, a web dev column, etc.. whatever your interests are.

Personally I don't really mind the broken-up content but I do mind Twitter as a platform. It does tracking and it tries to constantly push me to make an account and/or use their app. I definitely won't use tools to make it more usable either. It's not about usability, it's about Twitter itself.

But it's fine, it doesn't have to be for everyone.

Agree. I’ve got all social media blocked at the firewall. Posts like this are lost to me.

I have resorted to just using my own nitter install for all things twitter. Here's an example from a public instance [1]. Of course this is read-only but that's all I want, mostly to check in on @mntmn. I love the interface, it fixes everything I hate about twitter except the shitty dynamics and the fact that it is twitter.

It's dead simple to host as a docker instance by the way, and with privacy redirect [2] it's pretty seamless.

[1]: https://nitter.42l.fr/Foone/status/1423082372795305985

[2]: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

I wrote a little script, let's call it "twt", using stunnel and netcat to retrieve all tweets for a user and print a simple HTML blog page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28071491

For example, to read foone as a blog

   twt foone > 1.json
   twt < 1.json > 1.htm
   firefox ./1.htm

The blog page looks like this

(only first 50 lines shown for brevity; URLs are hyperlinks)

   Fri Feb 15 03:51:09 +0000 2008
   https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing
   https://t.co/RWnHtUISyM
   https://floppy.foone.org/w/Main_Page
   https://t.co/0gnaVwARmR

   Thu Aug 05 05:29:51 +0000 2021
   1423154262276665349
   https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1423154262276665349/photo/1
   https://t.co/JiAIJaORFt
   https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1423154262276665349/photo/1
   https://t.co/JiAIJaORFt
   I saw a sign that said not to take photos. So I took a photo of it
   https://t.co/JiAIJaORFt

   Fri Feb 15 03:51:09 +0000 2008
   https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing
   https://t.co/RWnHtUISyM
   https://floppy.foone.org/w/Main_Page
   https://t.co/0gnaVwARmR

   Thu Aug 05 04:16:42 +0000 2021
   1423135852612317184
   https://twitter.com/ASovietOnion/status/1422672792860954627/photo/1
   https://t.co/alyaBjyMfc
   https://twitter.com/ASovietOnion/status/1422672792860954627/photo/1
   https://t.co/alyaBjyMfc
   RT @ASovietOnion: why did i make this https://t.co/alyaBjyMfc (RETWEET)

   Fri Apr 19 09:27:10 +0000 2019
   http://bing.com
   https://t.co/nzJr38i0mG

   Tue Aug 03 21:36:40 +0000 2021
   1422672792860954627
   https://twitter.com/ASovietOnion/status/1422672792860954627/photo/1
   https://t.co/alyaBjyMfc
   https://twitter.com/ASovietOnion/status/1422672792860954627/photo/1
   https://t.co/alyaBjyMfc
   why did i make this https://t.co/alyaBjyMfc

   Fri Feb 15 03:51:09 +0000 2008
   https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing
   https://t.co/RWnHtUISyM
   https://floppy.foone.org/w/Main_Page
   https://t.co/0gnaVwARmR

   Thu Aug 05 04:14:47 +0000 2021
   1413694652822163459
   https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1423135371139837954/photo/1

Foone is literally enough reason to use Twitter alone.

Yeah he is amazing! Such a diverse chap :-)

Foone wouldn’t be foone in any other format. They make great content and I wouldn’t wish them to change anything.

It hurts how much that resonates with me, especially the constant editing. I'll probably be editing this post for two hours and attempt to tomorrow but then realize that it's too late.

I do not mind these at all. Am I really auch a minority or are people who don‘t like threads just very loud?

I like the reading cadence, I like reading in the twitter mobile app and I like the ability to precisely reply to things or expand in a quote RT. Seems great to me, but I also have ADHD so maybe that‘s it.

It’s pretty great. Small pieces you can individually read/share/react to.

Personally I'm not a huge fan because of how spaced out the text content is. So many images breaking the flow of thought. Id rather blocks of text and then a gallery of images. But you get what you get. A string of tweets is better than nothing.

It seems like it‘s really a "type of brain" thing. I think I would even appreciate an alternative browser reader mode that puts normal articles in this style, only on a phone though.

Not w.r.t Fone but the input side of the threaded tweets are being addressed by app(web) like typefully, it splits long post into tweets and it does it well.

Reading side of threaded tweets require invoking bots like threaderapp, I'm not sure whether there's enough need for an app which renders threads as a post directly but I'm trying to find it out[2].

[1] https://typefully.app/

[2] https://needgap.com/problems/279-better-way-to-read-twitter-...

Or they could write short, tweet-style posts on a platform like micro.blog so they can still write in a way that aligns with the way their brain works while not having to deal with the way Twitter doesn't (and micro.blog will syndicate to Twitter for them so they needn't lose the Twitter audience).

I strongly suspect the real reason is they just doesn't care enough to spend time trying something different. And that's totally fine! They have absolutely no obligation to change just because a bunch of folks dislike reading tweet threads.

But there are absolutely alternatives out there if folks are interested in checking them out.

It does make me wonder if there is a need for personal microblogging software that presents to the world a bit better for reading. I notice we didn't get much uptake on our attempt at blogging for folks. Yet they can make quick Facebook posts easily. I do wonder how much friction a title has on sending out your thoughts.

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