For me, Micro.blog is a good, but not great, hosting platform. I see Manton Reece, the proprietor of Micro.blog, focused on making the platform into a suite of products — RSS reader, note taker, book tracker, podcast platform, etc. — and I am not the customer for those products.
Micro.blog is a very small,...
mitchwagner.com
@MitchWagner Whilst I don’t disagree with you … no software can be and everything. To me the core of MB is the one place … the database of record … your home for your stuff .. your place to ‘aggregate - curate and syndicate’ your web world .. I don’t see an alternative that comes close.
It’s not perfect … and if it was my business I would definitely be managing and developing for MB in a very different way - but if I wanted an easy place to ‘aggregate - curate and syndicate’ - I’m not sure where else I would go?
@JohnPhilpin Are we disagreeing here? I signed up for Micro.blog as a platform for blogging and sharing to social media. I see Bookshelves, Notes, the RSS reader and AI integration as distractions. @manton seems to have decided the blog/social integration parts are feature-complete and I see plenty of room for improvement.
However, as you say, there does not seem to be an alternative.
@MitchWagner we are in total agreement the ‘usp’ for Manton .. in my mind … is aggregate, curate, syndicate .. I am not aware of anyone who does that as well .. if at all.
The plethora of side apps seems to me to create the Swiss Army knife .. one of my johisms …
**** Connect .. don’t Collect.
@MitchWagner @JohnPhilpin Thanks as always for the feedback. To be clear, I don’t think the social part is feature complete. There’s more we can do. But I don’t think it needs exactly the same features of other social networks.
@MitchWagner @JohnPhilpin @manton Coming back to micro.blog after 5 years away, I find how little the core experience has changed and I mean that as a genuine compliment. The new additions are there if you want them, but they don’t get in the way of me just posting. What I have come to appreciate is trust in the setup remaining stable (which I have failed for myself while self-hosting or even on the Fediverse in general). The newer platforms that have emerged since micro.blog (many with similar IndieWeb or richer feature sets per se) don’t give me that same confidence right now either.
@chaitanya I cannot disagree with what you write .. I think my frustration is knowing the resource constraints that Manton works with … I would rather more focus on developing the core of micro blog and its unique position in this world rather than giving the world (say) another RSS reader et al.
@JohnPhilpin Agreed. Though I will always support a good new RSS reader for Linux (even though I know that’s the last of the OS family that will ever get it given currently there are no Micro.blog or even Micropub client for it). I am being greedy here ahahahaha!
@manton Fair enough and I do appreciate your continuing to discuss these issues.
Part of my frustration with Micro.blog \is I don’t actually know what I want at this point!
I’m active on Mastodon, BlueSky and the blogosphere, and I want the people who follow me to have native experiences on each platform. Maintaining a presence in all three places involves far too much cutting-and-pasting. Manton, I perceive you like to keep Mastodon and Bluesky at arm’s length. Not have a native experience there, but rather use those platforms to drive readers here.
I’m also active on Tumblr, but micro.blog’s syndication there is great, so that’s not a problem for me. Also, I perceive Tumblr is, sadly, waning.
And I’m also active on Facebook, but Facebook is actively hostile to automation so I don’t expect Micro.blog to do much there. Indeed, Facebook is where I get most of the activity on my posts.
Also, we disagree about boosts/reblogging. I have disagreed with you (respectfully!) about that for years, and my disagreement is getting more powerful now. Boosts/reblogging is a powerful tool for discovering new content. I’m particularly seeing that on Mastodon. Not supporting boosts and reblogs is like not supporting vowels.
BTW, welcome back to Micro.blog, @chaitanya ! I hope you enjoy it.