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Microblogging clients

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This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

My Twitter activity has really picked up in the last couple of months. I’d love to have something more integrated with my desktop but so far the best Twitter client I’ve found is the Twitter website.

I sponsored the original inclusion of corebird into Debian’s package repsoitories. This is a great native client and Phillip Rinn does a great job maintaining it (I gave him Debian Maintainer privileges now to do uploads without my picking apart every upload). He’s also added a backport of the latest version so it can be installed on the current Debian stable release. My problem with corebird however is that it doesn’t support “free” networks.

By this I mean GNU Social, Mastodon or pump.io. There was a request to add GNU Social support for corebird but it was rejected. Their FAQ states that they don’t want to support other services and the developers are free to decide this.

rainbowstream is another great native Linux Twitter client, but again I can’t find any support for alternative networks.

The only client I have that supports both Twitter and the 57North Hacklab GNU Social instance is Bitlbee which I have hooked up to my Weechat along with my IRC sessions. This used to be OK but I find now that without the images, I’m really missing out.

If someone wanted to make a rainbowstream like image viewer integrated with Bitlbee (IRC does support colours to an extent) then this would be awesome. If you know of a good native Linux Twitter/GNU Social client, let me know. I’d love to be able to use the GNU Social more.

If you have GNU Social or Mastodon, you should be able to remote follow me here.

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