Readme is a purposefully feature-lite Twitter reader designed to show you the tweets you signed up to see. Take back your timeline. No interactions, no Moments, no ads, no trends, think of Readme as a media-rich RSS feed for your Twitter feed. Want to dip into your feed, but not get involved in any threads? Take a glance through Readme.

No interactions, no Moments, no ads, no trends, think of Readme as a media-rich RSS feed for your Twitter feed.

Want to dip into your feed, but not get involved in any threads? Take a glance through Readme.

Take back your timeline.

Cool work guys, it looks good! :) I'm curious about how you've done it technically speaking? Could you share more about it? Thank you!

@eveningkid Sure thing. I will do a proper write up soon, but it's building upon an existing product we have (Readme web) which I wrote about here https://medium.com/@benhowdle/bu.... So with Readme for iOS, I've built a React Native app (using Expo on top) and it communicates with the existing API I built for the web version. The API is stateless, so it has no concept of sessions. Every time you log in/refresh your tweets, I'm sending the stored token on your device to my API, which then just makes the request to the Twitter API on your behalf. The native app source can be viewed here: https://github.com/benhowdle89/r...

Are ads really such a pain on Twitter that you want the company to hurt? IMO- Twitters ads are non-obtrusive and seeing them supports my favorite product/service. Ads on web are a whole other story...

@clprenz they’re not the biggest gripe, for me personally anyway. It’s the whole package. I just want a chronological list of tweets from the people I follow. Twitter doesn’t seem to offer that in their clients. This is just an RSS feed for your timeline.

@clprenz How are text based ads or not complex image ada like Google Adsense, for example, dissimilar to Twitter’s ads? Over half of Twitter’s revenue comes from video ads so image ads that are not over the top can’t be the problem.

@clprenz Legit one of the only points I think I disagree with Ben on is that lack of ads is a 'feature' in any way. There are none because the exact purpose of Readme (web and iOS) is to really narrow down your Twitter timeline, lack of ads is a 'spandrel' to this core tenet more than a conscious marketing point. This is never going to replace Twitter, and someone could very easily replicate this functionality on real life twitter dot com with a few simple browser extensions - the idea here is to, when someone _wants_ it, present an extremely focussed, streamlined subset of Twitter, while leaving the fully-fledged experiences of the site and native apps intact. I agree that twitter's promoted tweets are on the better end of the intrusivity spectrum, and I don't personally block ads on Twitter because of this. Twitter has a long history of treating third party developers, bluntly, like shit. Their API is at a point now where it's so restricted and idiosyncratic that anything we can build with it is unlikely to 'hurt the company'. Finally, Twitter is full of literal Nazis and they have absolutely zero qualms serving triggering and emotionally provocative content to vulnerable people - until they fix that I'm more than happy to say Twitter's wellbeing as a company is as far away from my focus as can be. Companies aren't people, and if they were Twitter would be an actual proper gobshite. Sorry if that was a long as heck rant, but there are ethical, technical and idealistic reasons why twitter's wellbeing is, to me, secondary to that of its users. And I'm happy to admit that my reasons for this initial concept are almost solely to provide respite from the, frankly weird as hell, direction Twitter has gone in recent years. It's honestly cool that you like twitter and you're concerned about supporting them by allowing ads, and I can only speak for myself with this attitude; turns out Ben and I wanted the same tool, for different reasons. Sorry for how longwinded this is, and thanks for your comment!

I love this idea, great work folks!

@fehler Thanks Chris! Was a fun little project to work on...

Readme

A purposefully feature-lite Twitter reader app

A purposefully feature-lite Twitter reader app

Readme

A purposefully feature-lite Twitter reader app

A purposefully feature-lite Twitter reader app

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