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An audio reader for your X/Twitter feed(

Posted by sanjastepa |3 hours ago |1 comments

sanjastepa 3 hours ago

Hey HN — I built Xeder to solve a personal problem: I want to stay caught up with tech Twitter but I lose too much time to doomscrolling.

The core idea is simple — X/Twitter is text-first, which means the content works as audio. Xeder reads your timeline aloud so you can catch up while doing other things.

Some technical details since I know HN appreciates these:

- Chrome MV3 extension - Content script scrapes tweets from the DOM and injects the player UI via Shadow DOM (so it doesn't break X's page styles) - Service workers in MV3 can't play audio (no DOM access), so there's a hidden offscreen document that handles all audio playback - TTS via Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API, proxied through Firebase Cloud Functions (so the API key stays server-side) - License validation through Firestore with device ID tracking - Automatically filters promoted tweets/ads

The build story: I'm a UX designer, not a developer. I designed the full product — UX flows, UI specs, interaction design — and used Claude to write the code. Took it from Figma-level specs to a working, published Chrome extension. The MV3 audio architecture was the hardest part — the service worker limitation means you need a whole separate document just to play sound, coordinated through message passing.

$4.99 one-time purchase. Would love feedback on the concept and the technical approach.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IAdt40CJkg

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xeder/oebnkicaadfol...