plaintweet

I built plaintweet over the weekend and posted it on Hacker News yesterday. Didn't think it will do well, so went to sleep - only to be woken up by my phone buzzing.

It hit the front page of Hacker News and remained in top 20 for some time. It also stayed in second position of Show HN for significant part of the day.

I did not add any analytics code since I did not want to track users, so I don't have concrete numbers on how many people visited the app. But there are server request logs which gives a ball park figure and it is over 15,000 requests.

I did not have any expectations for this. I only built this for myself, to solve a problem I had. I just quickly deployed it to a $5 Linux VM since I was not expecting any usage.

Two major surprises:

1. A $5 VM can easily handle over 15,000 requests a day. The average CPU usage was only around 2-3% during peak traffic.
2. A couple of HN users said they would pay for this as an iOS app. Though I don't have any idea to monetize this (at least not yet), it was good to hear that.

Since 05/23 - 05/25 is a long weekend and I had some time, I decided to build a side project.

I initially had this idea a week back when I was using Twitter, although this has been on the back of my mind for longer than that.

I wanted a way to get the best out of Twitter, and best for me meant: build real connections, have interesting conversations and learn.

To do this, it meant that I had to rethink the way I was using Twitter and create some rules for myself. I read few blog posts by people who have done something similar and took some inspiration from there.

The main rules were:

1. I always want to see most recent tweets first
2. I didn't want to see any likes or replies or retweets. Only original tweets.
3. No distracting media. I only wanted to see plain urls.
4. No profile image since it made me subconsciously scan tweets
5. No clutter

So I started building the app. I'm a dotnet developer, so I decided to build this using dotnet core 3.1 (MVC) deployed to a VM. I have experience with this tech stack before so it was easy to build and deploy.

The app doesn't use any JavaScript. There is not even analytics code. It uses water.css which is super minimal. So the app is available in light mode and dark mode.

My expectations:
This is a side project I built for myself mostly and hence it is completely free. I don't plan on monetizing and that's the reason I don't even have any analytics. If people like it and they use it, it would have served it's purpose. If people really love it and they donate, that's a plus.

Where does this app go from here:
I don't want this app to become like other Twitter apps out there. I want the app to stay minimal. It should not do anything that it doesn't have to. If there is any feature that will really add to the project, I will be including it. And I will also fix any bugs users find. But other than that, this is pretty much a final product.

If you like use it and have any feedback, I would love to hear it.