Making deck.blue my job

As you may know, I was laid off 4 months ago and have been, since then, looking for a Mobile Developer job at any place that used Flutter for Android or iOS. After a few unsuccessful tries and being ghosted by the last place I was interviewed, I decided to not look for a job anymore and instead make deck.blue my full-time job.

I was already kind of working on it full-time since the layoff, but I was still looking for something else and didn't actually commit to spending a "work day" on deck.blue's updates and rewrite (v3). This changes today.

Money talk

Right now, deck.blue's patrons are providing me with enough money to pay rent and food, and I thank you so much for that. But unfortunately it's not even matching what my previous job paid me monthly and by living in São Paulo with a goal to eventually move out from Brazil, a few changes are needed for me to make this my day job.

The first change is the following: I'll increase the price of all tiers by a bit as well as increase their advantages/features, see below. All current subscribers will still be able to pay the old monthly amount as long as you don't unsubscribe, if you do then I won't be able to do much since Patreon only lets me do this for uninterrupted subscriptions.

• Booster - $1 → $2

  • From 10 scheduled posts to 20

  • From 4 accounts to 6

• Initial - $2 → $4

  • From 20 scheduled posts to 40

  • From 6 accounts to 8

• Helper - $3 → $6

  • From 30 scheduled posts to 60

  • From 8 accounts to 10

• Supporter - $5 → $8

  • From 50 scheduled posts to 100

  • From 10 accounts to 20

• Sponsor - $7 → $10

  • From 100 scheduled posts to 300

The tier changes went up in 2.12.1+764, so you can add more accounts and schedule more posts already!

For new subscribers, I'll also offer a 50% discount coupon on the new prices for the first month (starting today): 7C3E9, use this when finishing your subscription! If you're not happy about this change, I thank you so much for all your support until now and please let me know if you would like a refund of this month's subscription if it's already paid.

More features will be available to higher tiers, too. For deck.blue's v3, I'll add repost and video scheduling and that will only be available to patrons that are on the Supporter tier and higher. Another big paid feature that's coming later is list and starter pack management. deck.blue already kind of has a list management feature but it's really not that good UX and I want to improve on that. Think of stuff like merging two lists/packs together in a new one, removing users in a list using another list as a base and better batch add/remove from both.

I'll also try to make deck.blue more known, even if it's this current version, so I'll reach out to some big accounts to see if they're interested in using deck.blue as their main Bluesky tool! Be sure to also share with anyone that might be missing TweetDeck over on our side.

deck.blue version 3

I'm giving myself a deadline of July, 2025 to finish v3, so I have roughly 4 months to finish the rewrite. Update on this here! As I said, I'll be working on this as if it was my main job, so it should be doable. This is also a "guarantee" of sorts to all current and future subscribers. I can't really promise all these features and keep postponing it for random reasons, but I need to guarantee that deck.blue as it is will be usable in a new framework by then. This doesn't mean the new paid features will be available at the same time as v3, but I'll try to make it so.

What do you mean by a new framework and this rewrite?, you might be asking if you haven't read the recent changelogs.

deck.blue v1 and v2 were built using Flutter Web and that unfortunately turned out to be a mistake for many reasons; it's only "emulating" a proper web app so many behaviors that should just work, don't. You might have wondered why you can't right-click images or even links, or why stuff just breaks in Firefox/Safari, or why you can't customize stuff with CSS editors; that's all because Flutter Web renders deck.blue as if it was a game, frame by frame. It's more similar to Google Earth (which does use Flutter now) than to what the previous TweetDeck was.

So deck.blue v3 is me rewriting the whole thing from scratch in React (not Native, just normal React web). You should expect better performance and all of the issues above to be solved, as well as better general behavior on all browsers.

Once I'm finished with the rewrite, v3 will go up in the URL you're already used to and v2 will be made open-source. You'll be able to run it locally in your computer (you'll need Flutter 3.27 to do that and a bit of coding knowledge). Features like scheduling and inline translations that do need a server will be removed from this version and it's basically for archival purposes. The current version available today will be kept in old.deck.blue for a while but without any maintenance.

The migration to v3 should also be straight-forward, though everyone will need to login again once it goes up. All your current columns and settings will be made compatible and you should expect all current behavior to be the same, but in a proper web app instead.

The future

So I'm going to make deck.blue my full-time job, what about the future? I haven't decided if deck.blue will grow into an actual business yet, but one thing that deck.blue is missing that old TweetDeck offered is team management. I'll work on this once all the new paid features have been released and it basically means allowing business accounts to "share" their access with other accounts. Think deck.blue's account today, I'm its sole user, but if I were to hire a customer support person, I would like to have a way to allow that person access and keep monitoring that somehow (which posts were made by who?), as well as having the power to remove the access whenever I like. You can kind of do this already by sharing app passwords with everyone that needs access to a specific account, but it's cumbersome and people still don't really understand how app passwords work (please, save them in a password manager since you can't see them again once you generate one).

Thank you so much

for keeping up with deck.blue ever since the Patreon was launched back in October, 2023. You've helped a me get through some tough times and made this big enough for me to be able to make this my full-time job and for that I'll be forever grateful. If you also wanna help in another way besides the Patreon, my wife is starting to receive illustration commissions to help us sustain ourselves, please check her out!

Please remember: I'm still deck.blue's only employee. Every single like given to help someone that was saying "i wonder if there is a tweetdeck for bluesky yet" find the deck.blue account, every single reply given to help with some issue, every single DM answered was by only one person and it'll keep that way until deck.blue gets big enough to pay more than one salary.

Let's keep making Bluesky the new town-square of the internet and I'll be here to suffice your TweetDeck needs! Once again, thank you!