Microblogging, a fable: manton.org

@Ianbradbury Actually no, just coincidence! 🙂 It was something that had been spinning around in my head the last few weeks.

@manton I really like Micro.blog’s flexibility for short- and long-form posts, plus the ability to cross-post to other platforms. I see it as a home base.

@kalikambo Thanks! Glad you like it. That “home base” is a good way to think about it.

@manton You know I like Micro.blog and evangelize it on other platforms whenever I get a chance. I would say the infrastructure is great. I’m not even worried about the ocassional downtime or serve crash as some are. I will add that even the “engagement” is superior (a post is draft on that).

​My hestiation comes from the fact that it’s still inconvenient and not as intuititive to use. The new web editor is flaky and swallows writing more often than Iike ( I’ve used ⌘ Z so many times now) The UI ‘prettiness’ is a factor but not as much for now. I understand and believe in the principle that you should post to your blog first but it seems like a chore. I’m struggling to find the right flow and the right app to use when in fact, I should be focusing on the writing.

@manton One of my online regrets is that I have so little online presence between 2001 and 2019. And for most of this period, I was just posting on someone else’s website. that’s not happening anymore. I’ll “POSSE” for life now!

@pcora Hope you have imported all those posts to your blog now.

@pratik I lost most of it. I imported some from App.net, and I might still have some Twitter ones left to parse and possibly import one day. I had several accounts, and a lot of things got deleted. Is it worth keeping? I’m not sure, but I won’t make that mistake again. My current approach is to keep everything on the blog, but auto-delete on Mastodon and Bluesky every two weeks.

@pcora

> My current approach is to keep everything on the blog, but auto-delete on Mastodon and Bluesky every two weeks.

That’s interesting. Do you crosspost from your blog to these two sites?​

@pratik

​> I understand and believe in the principle that you should post to your blog first but it seems like a chore.​

This is the part I’ve never understood, because it’s one of the things that Micro.blog makes super straightforward for me. I feel like maybe the chore ​part for you is high level of concern about where you want to cross post, whereas @manton feels like the chore is presenting options to people about that at all? I’m not sure. But it feels dead simple to just post to Micro.blog. That’s a huge part of why it has stuck for me.

@jsonbecker

> the chore ​part for you is high level of concern about where you want to cross post.

That’s correct. For someone who wants to and is comfortable sharing everything across all platforms, Micro.blog works perfectly out of the box. I maintain different personas on different platforms so selective cross-posting is important to me. Part of it has come from the concern of not facing repurcussions.

@manton The copyeditor part of me would like to suggest you adjust the home page copy a bit to reflect what you’ve articulated so well in this post. Maybe something like, “Micro.blog is your space on the open web. Post short thoughts or long essays, share photos, and connect with others. Have conversations at your own pace within the friendly Micro.blog community and across the Fediverse.”

@jsonbecker @pratik same for me. Micro.blog has removed all the friction for me. I use to run my own blog and spend ages trying to make posting as smooth as possible doing all kinds of gymnastics with shortcuts and python scripts and apps that claimed to do what I want. @manton just took out all the rough edges for me. I do have a blog that I can fiddle with to my hearts content (but really don’t need to), but am still posting to a social timeline (or several if I feel like cross-posting).

@Annie @manton 👍🏻

@Annie @manton This is great copy! It would have helped me when I joined to have understood micro.blog this way.

@pratik yes. I was in and out of Bluesky. But decided to just cross-post there anyways. And I’ll also add threads. My approach is leaning towards: if that’s where you want to follow ppl, I’m there. But it starts on my blog.

@manton I like Micro.blog quite a bit but I do not recommend it to more people because of the sporadic responsiveness to bug reporting and the high degree of technical skills required for customization.

At this point, I’m just living with Micro.blog as it is — and enjoying it. I don’t want to overstate my frustration; it’s not a big deal.

Also, cross-posting and syndication is inelegant. I have suggested partial improvements, but the problem is, perhaps, mostly unsolvable, simply because services like Mastdodon, Bluesky and Threads are inherently going to be constrained due to character limits and inability to support inline images and HTML.

@pratik I pretty much keep the same persona on all platforms, excepting LinkedIn. I don’t understand how people maintain different personas on different platforms; it doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not being critical here, just observing a difference.

I recently decided to stop cut-and-pasting everything to Facebook, partly because ​a lot of what I post here seems inappropriate there. My cousin the retired dental hygienist is probably not interested in my PKM experiments, and I don’t want to be the guy who brings politics to his Facebook friends.

OK, re-reading the above, maybe I do understand personas after all. Still, I don’t see a need to have different personas on here, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky and Tumblr. I post the same to all those places. ​

What are your guidelines for posting? What goes where?

@manton I had a random thought:

You — maybe it was you and Vincent, I can’t remember the details — briefly had a dev blog for Epilogue. I thought that was a good idea, broadly speaking. However, it could be a useful marketing tool if used differently:

Considering the awesome “5 blog” upgrade, have you considered maybe having single pages for each of the big features of the platform? That way there is more room for the feature to be fully highlighted and explained, whilst each page/blog could end with the same “As part of your Micro.blog plan” type message.

By being separate blogs — per the feature itself — they could then have their own domains or just use the default subdomain which in itself is a demo of the platform’s strong support for domain-based features.

@MitchW I’m going to list it here instead of being tempted to do it in a post ☺️

1. Micro.blog: first place to post. Everything.
2. Mastodon (writing.exchange): Everything from Micro.blog crossposted. Sometimes I manually delete some posts that are Micro.blog-specific.
3. Bluesky: crossposted posts categorized as “Bluesky” (via Echofeed). I use a pseudonym here that I don’t want traced back to Micro.blog. Hence all posts are < 300 characters. Embedded images are not linked to Micro.blog thankfully. Don’t think anyone on there knows me but I rather not have the people there reading my Micro.blog where I use my real name and post personal stuff.
4. Threads: Currently manually crossposting via the Posts page and very rarely. Many IRL friends and family follow me here coz Instagram. Like with Bluesky, I don’t want them reading my Micro.blog. More so in this case. I may crosspost the same posts that I do on Bluesky here once Echofeed includes Threads or Manton makes selective crossposting per-post easier. One slip up and people will know of my blog.
5. Other: Pixelfed - I’ve setup cross posting via Echofeed such that only JPG photos are shared. Hence I import other images that I don’t want crossposted as JPEG or PNG to Micro.blog.

Now, why am I so selective about who reads what? Call it an immigrant or minority mentality or desire to cultivate different personas. I want to be open and more personal on Micro.blog coz I trust the community here and appreciate the feedback. If I crosspost everything everywhere, I will have to change how and what I write.

@SimonWoods At some point, it may be worth exploring if the term ‘blog’ should be used. But difficult to do that since it’s in the name.

@SimonWoods We still do have an Epilogue blog here, although it’s not updated often. Your suggestion is similar to something else I’ve been thinking about, to better highlight how Micro.blog can be a suite of related apps.

@pratik Valid choices. As for me, I’m paranoid about security so I assume everything’s going to leak anyway.

I chose the mitchw.blog domain sometime during the 2020-22 timeframe when I had two separate employers, both of which were very concerned about posts that could be connected with them. So I scrubbed my complete name from social media (other than LinkedIn) as best as I could. My new employer doesn’t mind as much — which was the case for most of the past 15 years. ​
​

@pratik interesting conversation.. I’m a big POSSE fan here… but the idea of having personas is interesting..

@numericcitizen I’m for POSSE too coz I’ll never cut-paste (too much work). I rather have internal rules and automated workflow to do that. Well, think of personas as your Reddit handle. I doubt anyone on there uses their real name or writes overtly personal stuff that can be linked back to them.

@Annie @manton Upvoting this! I’d love to help promote Micro.blog more but it is a weird internet animal to explain sometimes.

@Annie I like this! @manton, I have a couple of friends that I’d love to have on here, and wondering just now if it’s hard to set up a gift membership?

@pcora Would you mind share how you are auto-deleting in Bluesky? I have that set in Mastodon but haven’t found a way to do it in Threads and Bluesky and have been doing it manually.

@manton Writing , what and how you write, comes in waves. For me it is constant but takes different forms and sizes. Micro.blog fits somewhere in this realm. What is certain to whatever is harboured on the web is that it be absent the almighty algorithm and megalomaniac owners.

@toddgrotenhuis sure, I use bsky.jazco.dev/cleanup it’s been working very well for several months already.

@manton for those who are interested in My main criticism of Micro.blog…

@fabio Good feedback, thanks. We are not going to add any new apps! We’ll continue to work on improving this. I’m confident it can be better even within the limits of how we’ve architected the app.

@manton thank you for reading Manton.

@manton What a great discussion here! I love @Annie’s suggestion. And I also like @SimonWoods’s idea. Right now, while there is documentation for M.b features, it can be hard to find.

@manton Oh also! I find the Android app to be super low-friction for blogging. Looking at my stats, you can see a huge jump after I moved my hosting from self-hosted WordPress to Micro.blog at the end of 2019.

@KimberlyHirsh Glad to hear it about Android!

@manton haha excellent points. Then people spend ages trying to to turn it into Twitter, Instagram, Mastadon etc. Keep up the good work.

@KimberlyHirsh @manton I’ve often wondered if building documentation in something like Starlight (or other) rather than a forum software would make life easier? Maybe more complicated to update and maintain then?

@iChris @KimberlyHirsh We used to have a separate site for documentation and I wanted to merge this together to have one less thing to manage. But yes, the forums are not ideal, although it’s nice to search everything at once and get customer answers too. Maybe docs should be a sort of sub-section of the forums powered by a real tool.

@manton

> “It’s not enough to be the best at what you do. You must be the only one who does what you do.”

Jerry Garcia

@manton @KimberlyHirsh Micro.blog isn’t open source, right? But is there a way for community members to help somehow that doesn’t create a mess of more work for you? :) Something for a longer discussion perhaps.

@iChris @manton A wiki! 😉

@pratik this!

@arandomselection I’ve more than one response in this conversation so not sure what you are replying to 😊 (also an issue on the Micro.blog timeline)​