What is Offline Twitter
Offline Twitter is an alternative client for browsing Twitter, which automatically saves a copy of everything you view. It’s a native desktop app, built using Qt5 and Golang.
What’s the point of it?
There are several reasons I started this project.
Fight data centralization
Being able to control and to own your data is a moral issue. I don’t like centralized platforms having control over what I can see online. I especially don’t like the idea that they can delete something I liked, and I would never be able to see it again.
Big tech platforms are misusing their power to control the digital space; they are ban-happy and censorious. They have an agenda of their own and I don’t like it. Having control over your own data is a prerequisite of being able to fight back against this.
I’m a software purist
I like good software, and I hate bad software. The Twitter web UI is bad software.
- it uses a ton of memory
- it’s slow
- it’s full of spyware and ads
- there’s always annoying left-wing political nonsense in the sidebar
- recently there seem to be a number of layout-related bugs
- There’s this weird “algorithm” that nobody knows what it is, but for some reason it prevents you from seeing tweets from people you’re subscribed to
I actually don’t like web browsers and web UIs in general. This article (not written by me) explains some reasons why.
What does it do?
Offline Twitter is a Twitter client. It’s a desktop-app (it does NOT use Electron). As you browse, it saves a copy of everything you view onto your hard drive. It’s yours until you decide to delete it.
The data is stored in a simple format designed to be maximally easy to use with other applications. Images and videos are stored as regular files in a folder on your disk; tweet data is stored in a SQLite database file with a logical and straightforward format.
What does it not do?
Offline Twitter is not a panacea. (I just do this in my free time, you know!) In particular, there’s no support for anything to do with logging in. This includes:
- logging in
- posting tweets
- liking or retweeting
- getting notifications
Because data sovereignty is the primary focus, Twitter features that aren’t directly related to that haven’t been added yet. This means the “client” is very bare-bones. Currently, it’s just for browsing. Adding an authentication sub-system makes the whole project much more complicated; so far I’ve taken advantage of the fact that you don’t need to log in to browse Twitter. It will happen, eventually!
For the time being though, if you want to interact with twitter content as a logged-in user, you’ll have to open a browser and do them there.
Secondly: Offline Twitter only affects your browsing experience. It has no effect on whether other people can see your tweets properly (unless they are also using Offline Twitter, of course!).