deck.blue v2.9.0 is up + first anniversary!

Hey everyone! Been a while since the last update and general news about deck.blue. Hope you all have been well and thank you so much for all your support throughout this last year!

Today marks one year since I've started developing this project. You can check what the first versions had here and see a rough timeline before I added the Patreon integration and multi-account on 2.0.0 and started posting changelogs here. Developing deck.blue for the past year has been a humbling experience since it was my first ever web app (I've only published mobile apps before this) and getting to know the whole web development experience was a bit tough, but worth it. Unfortunately I made a decision that came back to bite me after this whole time: Flutter Web. If you're not familiar with this, it's the reason why deck.blue doesn't behave like a proper website. It's effectively rendered as a game: frame by frame and has lots of emulation involved to get to the proper web behaviors (and sometimes not even getting there).

As you might know from the last few posts, this current version of deck.blue is entering maintenance mode as of today and 2.9.0 is the last major update. I haven't been able to keep up with the Bluesky team's features alone and the Flutter Web situation has really demotivated me from adding new features, not knowing how stable the framework will be in the next few months. In the latest update they've changed it so they're not recommending the HTML renderer anymore, and that is a bad sign, as the CanvasKit renderer has loads of issues regarding deck.blue's features and overall usecase as a social media client, and it's just a matter of time before they deprecate it or remove it, which would basically mean the end of deck.blue as it is, and new versions wouldn't be possible.

I've talked in previous posts about rewriting deck.blue with a proper web framework such as React. That would mean loads of improvements, mainly in performance and overall compatibility with what's already available in the official Bluesky client (https://bsky.app), and also make it easier to get new features faster since I would be using their official API client too. That said, I have absolutely no familiarity with any web development whatsoever, which is why I used Flutter in the first place, and I'll need to take my time to study it from scratch, and only after properly studying it I will feel confident in rewriting the whole app. This will take time and I can't offer any ETA as to when the rewrite will be complete.

Once again, thank you all so much for all the support so far; and this isn't a goodbye or shutdown of the project, it's just a big pause and the current version of deck.blue will still work, scheduling is still available and if some Bluesky update breaks the core experience I'll take my time to fix it.

If you are already a Patreon subscriber, please consider remaining one because that will still maintain deck.blue's server, translation and scheduling costs; it'll also help me getting through the rewrite since everyone is basically paying me to do it at this point.

If you're considering stopping your subscription, that's also fine! Thank you so much for your support so far and I'm really grateful. Please consider supporting other Bluesky projects such as Skyfeed, Tokimeki and Skeetdeck instead!

The 2.9.0 update

As for the last update, here's the list of features and fixes:

• Inline translations! If you're a Patreon subscriber, you now have access to instant translations (provided by DeepL) in all posts!

• ALT text for GIFs! This was a missing feature, @debbieohi.com requested it a while ago and now it's available. You can also check available ALT text from GIFs that already had it from bsky.app

• Custom PDS support! If you have your own PDS, you weren't able to use deck.blue at all, but now it's properly supported and it should behave the same as it always has. Please let me know if you have any specific issues!

• Minor bug fixes and performance improvements from the latest Flutter update

• Fixed an issue where opening the "big image display" wouldn't respect the account of the column it came from, resulting in likes and reposts made from the default account instead. This isn't an issue if you only have one account setup.