(2020-12-26) Lee Building Lucerne A Twitter Experience Tailored To Me

Linus Lee: Building Lucerne, a Twitter experience tailored to me. Over the last week, I’ve been working on Lucerne, a Twitter “reader” app built to fit my personal needs from Twitter.

For me, Twitter serves two purposes. First, it’s a learning tool.

Second, it’s a place for me to share whatever I’m working on on my blog or on my side projects with my audience.

To make it possible to grow Lucerne as a tool gradually around my use cases like this, Lucerne is designed primarily around one important idea: filtered searches saved as “channels”.

With Lucerne, I can search for interesting conversations happening on Twitter by experimenting with these filters. When any filter seems particular useful, I can save it to check again later, by adding it to the left sidebar with a name. As I use the app, I end up curating an ever-changing personalized collection of these channels in my sidebar that provide multiple different views onto the firehose of Twitter.

“But Linus,” I hear you saying, “you can search and save them as timelines on Twitter’s app and Tweetdeck.” Yes, you’re right, and most of the search filters Lucerne uses are also available on Twitter. But the important thing about Lucerne isn’t just that you can search, but that playing with filters and saving the good ones is the primary user interface.

In addition to this main idea of channels, Lucerne has a few other design considerations to improve how Twitter works for me

Lucerne isn’t meant to be a Twitter replacement. Twitter’s web app is still great for writing and following threads, for example, and I don’t want to have to re-create something that’s already fine for my use

Here are a few use cases I stumbled into while using Lucerne that I otherwise couldn’t have.

Following interesting threads. I often stumble into interesting threads of tweets that I want to track somehow.

with Lucerne, I just saved filters for “replies to this tweet” as channels in my sidebar, and I’ve checked them regularly since to find interesting project updates and book recommendations

Following an account’s tweets on a topic.

Following an aesthetic. I noticed recently that a lot of @devonzuegel’s tweets about urban design either contain interesting quotes from books or inspiring historical photographs. I follow her, but thought it would be nice to have a separate channel to just keep track of these. So I made a filter for from:devonzuegel filter:images, for “tweets containing images from @devonzuegel” which I’ve been enjoying checking once every one or two days.

“Following” high-noise accounts without following. There are a few accounts, like @naval, @david_perell, or @paulg that occasionally tweet really interesting ideas, but whom I don’t follow because there’s a lot of noise.... “follow” the most popular tweets from these accounts