I just started listening to a discussion between @danielpunkass and @manton about the risk of Mastodon becoming the default #Fediverse platform, and crowding out other Fediverse services like Micro.blog (for example).
On a similar note, what if Tumblr becomes a dominant #ActivityPub service? Will it crowd out the rest?
I will probably have a few more thoughts when I have time to really listen and consider their thoughts.
Worth listening for sure, though: https://pca.st/rj79laxg#t=28m14s
@manton My pleasure. It's a fascinating discussion, and a good one to have, I think.
In addition, Micro.blog doesn't receive nearly enough attention. It's a perfect solution for people who find "regular" blogging solutions too complex.
@paul I am a little puzzled why Micro.blog isn't mentioned more often. We've been talking about doing some more actual marketing in January to help get the word out.
@manton You talked about hiring a graphic designer/marketing designer(?) earlier, if things played out favorably didn’t you? Or do I misremember this (not unlikely)?
@manton totally agree micro.blog needs way more attention as it’s better than Twitter and Mastodon by 10x
@manton it feels a bit niche in the sense that the average person looking for a platform would have heard about Wix or WordPress based on friends' recommendations or marketing campaigns.
The people I speak to every day tend to be pretty mainstream and they aren't aware of tech like ActivityPub and so on.
It's almost like Micro.blog is off the beaten track for most people looking for a blogging/posting solution.
@Medievalist Thanks! That does help. I think it's the combination of lots of little things... Links, blog posts, mentions. The next step for us is working on how we describe Micro.blog's value so newcomers aren't as confused.
@adamprocter @manton Agreed. Would a longer trial (e.g. 30 days) help? I’ve sent tips to several Norwegian publications about Micro.Blog, but I have no way of knowing if they even considered writing about it.
@odd Graphic designer would be great, but unfortunately right now is low priority... First step in growth should be around support and curation.
@manton to add to that, when people think about a short form posting option, Twitter has been the go-to for people who don't prefer to stick to Facebook or Instagram.
Micro.blog seems to straddle these two worlds. Those two worlds (WordPress/Wix Vs Twitter/FB/Instagram) can be pretty perplexing for regular people. They just don't notice your unique offering.
Hopefully this Fediverse/Mastodon surge opens the door to more options like yours.
@manton As a long-time micro.blog free user (and a history in user conversion work), I think the purchase process is a bit confusing. I kept looking for how to buy a $5/mo plan, but I couldn’t find it. Eventually, figured out the default was $5. Small tweaks could likely help!
@manton I just subscribed to digital version of my regional newspaper for $1 for 6 months (well, 26 weeks...) that auto-renews at $11/month after. If you're looking for low-barrier-to-entry models that do move the needle, something like that.
@SciPhi I like that! Nice thing about $1 is it gets the subscriber into the system but still keeps the spammers out.
@manton I wonder what percentage of your users are not developers, or are not particularly computer savvy? And, is that something that matters?
I found micro.blog difficult to set up, but obviously not impossible. Plus, I was motivated: determined not to be on mainstream platforms. But I have experience with other blogging platforms, I know what Markdown is, I know what a domain name is.
I wonder if part of the issue is the technology barrier. But perhaps you all are looking to market to people who are already comfortable with something more technologically DIY and challenging than, say, Weebly or Facebook or Twitter.
@annahavron In the long run developers should be a small percentage of users. I agree there are currently too many places where technical bits poke through.
@annahavron @manton I have not setup a new blog on Micro.blog recently but if you created a hosted blog, it's pretty straightforward, right? If you use the basic version, that is. Once you start to add bells and whistles, it gets technical really fast.
@annahavron @manton I’d echo what Anna said. Despite a history of blogging, I’m not particularly adept with technology and, like Anna, I was pretty motivated to move here so I was able to learn what I needed—with the excellent support through the help email. I find most of the talk recently about activitypub and mastodon utterly bewildering (and so I leave it alone). I will add that sometimes the timeline is very tech-heavy and it’s hard to get engagement with anything that isn’t about the latest gadget or service. Not that anyone owes anyone else any attention! I’m just saying that, as someone only a little tech-savvy and uninterested in the latest tech developments, it can be a bit of a hurdle to integrate into the community.
But I still absolutely love the place and the people! 😄
@annahavron, I totally understand. I have to try out the process sometime. I'm sure @manton is trying to make it simpler.
@pratik Oh, I've had a great experience here, like @jabel I love the community here, and i appreciate @manton 's taking the long view -- but I think part of it is that when you know so much about something (in this case, coding and creating sites online), it is hard to see the barriers for those who don't know those things.
Things that are basic to most people here, are difficult for me; and I had WordPress sites and am considered tech-savvy IRL. I'm the IT person at my house and at my workplace. Most of the people I live and work with, though, would be completely unable to start a blog on micro.blog; and, most of them also have Facebook or Twitter accounts.
It's not that they're not online; it's that micro.blog is too hard for most people to use, and the support documents are cryptic to non-coders. (Go click on "help" on the sidebar to see what I mean. It takes you to the micro.blog Help Center. You'll see a topic list full of technical things someone like me does not know how to do, and in many cases, I don't even know what they mean. Or, go to the Help contents page, click on "first steps," and ask someone who has never made their own site or used WordPress to tell you what they should do to set up a micro.blog account.)
So I could figure out how to use micro.blog, with caveats. Neither of my two blogs here looks the way I want them to look, because I don't have the time to laboriously figure out how to change them. (Or, possibly, break them; which would be depressing.) But - I like it here, I like the values that @manton and @jean have about online communities and how to foster life-giving interactions, and so I want to be a part of this. But it wasn't easy for me.
@annahavron Thank you for these notes. We keep on working to make this more accessible, and this kind of thoughtful critique is so valuable.
@annahavron I'm sure and thanks for the detailed response. I'm hardly a techie compared to most people here. But you're right, Mb ought to take a look at the documentation from a layperson’s perspective.
@annahavron @manton @jean I’m in the same boat as Anna. I’m fairly tech savvy and yet don’t find Micro.blog to be as easy to use. IMO having a consistent WYSIWYG editor across the web and apps would go a long way. Markdown is great but is a technical barrier in itself. It may not be hard to learn but having to learn it in itself is annoying for most non-tech-savvy people.
I also think that not having edit buttons right in our replies within the timeline as well as besides posts on out hosted blogs adds extra friction. It also doesn’t help IMO that replies don’t have media attachments. Anyone coming from any social platform would find that lacking, if not confusing.
The other thing I think would make a major difference is much better and clearer onboarding before and after signing up, for which I've already given ample suggestions in the past so won’t annoy you again with. :)
Aside: I found this post by Max Böck to be motivational reading along these lines.
@annahavron You wrote:
"micro.blog is too hard for most people to use, and the support documents are cryptic to non-coders."
Amen! Agree completely.
For me the corollary is that when you post something you have something to say, expressed in plain English. For me the most important tool of a blogger is fluency in a written language, English in my (and your) case.
Next after that is having something useful to write about. e.g. a how-to article on a topic that might interest a bunch of people, not too esoteric, such as your Analog Office postings. One day I saved seven of those postings in one day, as they presented tools I could use!
I find each of those to be far more valuable than a treatise on clever ways to format a post, basically coding tricks, how to prettify some text. I wish all that technical stuff could go into a separate technical area, removed from the Timeline. Call it Tinkerers' Corner.
@jean Phew! Really glad you received that in the spirit in which it was meant.
I love micro.blog. I want more people, from more diverse backgrounds, to feel empowered to use it. As it stands right now though, I'm related to someone who literally does brain surgery, whose response to micro.blog would be, "yeah, no; staying with TikTok" (Sidenote for medical humor fans: Dr. Glaucomflecken is from Portland, OR.)
This started out as a marketing thread and as I see it, I'm really talking about marketing: getting the word out about micro.blog, to the people who can use and enjoy it.
What I do for a living could be summed up as: 1) build and facilitate community among people who have significant political, philosophical, and socio-economic differences; and 2) make complex, actionable information accessible to people regardless of their educational backgrounds or technological know-how. So these are major professional interests for me.
As a professional community-builder I am so impressed with how micro.blog is mindfully and intentionally structured -- technologically and socially -- to foster a life-giving community. This is VERY hard to do, and you and @manton have done it very, very well. This is why I am here. I can start a blog in a lot of places. I'm here for the community.
I would love to read Manton's book for the community-building philosophy behind it, which would be useful to all kinds of communities, probably including my off-line ones; but I am honestly worried that it would be too technical for me to understand.
@uncertainquark excellent post! That was my exact experience looking into Mastodon, and -- yeah, no; I'll stick with micro.blog.
@Ron Thanks for your kind words about my writing! I rewrite intensively to communicate in plain English. It means a lot to hear that my efforts are working. So glad you've found some things to be useful, which is my other writing goal.
I personally like having just one timeline.
I don't see it as either/or; I see it as both/and. In my ignorance, I don't understand the technical tips, but I assume they are well-written and useful for those who do understand them.
And -- lots of developers here have wide-ranging interests! I love seeing people's cat and dog photos, and outdoor adventures, and have also gotten some very helpful information from following more tech-driven bloggers (e.g. I learned about the Johnny.Decimal system from a developer here; I've also learned about Standard Notes, TextExpander and some Obsidian tips which are truly useful for me).
I could equally see people wishing for a Luddites' Corner for paper and fountain pen stuff...
@annahavron @jean Thank you, this is a very helpful discussion. By the way, on the book, Part 6 "Community" is almost entirely non-technical. There are a few technical bits that snuck in, which maybe I should clean up in the final edit because they don't really belong there.
@manton @annahavron @jean Marketing, cross promotion idea… maybe ridiculous, but I’ve seen lots of posts recently from a certain someone that’s just releasing a new version of his blogging software that supports micro.blog. Might some sort of cross-promotional sale be done in the new year? A combo, sign-up for Micro.blog for a year and buy MarsEdit for a discount on both, something to promote both to new users. @danielpunkass
It’s been a while since I signed up and actually viewed the home page for people not logged in so I went back and had a look. With this thread in mind I read it more critically than I normally would with thoughts about new, non-technical users in mind. Or, taking it a step further, thinking about it from a perspective of person who may have heard the term blog a few times but not actually know what it means. Open platform? Cross-posting?
The last sentence of the first paragraph: “Micro.blog is a suite of tools made by people who love writing on the web.” This offers at least two blockages, “suite of tools” and “writing on the web”. I’m not a professional writer that needs tools. I may not even be a writer. I’m a person that wants to share photos of my cozy cat and talk about my coffee or my garden.
The help link at top should go to something less intimidating, perhaps the “Table of Contents” page. Also, what about a “getting started” link at the top of the home page that links to the Welcome.micro.blog page… make that more obvious.
More videos.
And on pricing, what about a family plan in addition to or alongside of the Teams pricing. The bias there is that micro.blog is for professionals. Why not offer a family plan? Let’s see if we can help aunts, uncles, siblings, etc get into micro.blogging. Perhaps it’s exactly the same thing but just worded differently.
@Denny @annahavron @jean @danielpunkass Good feedback, thanks. We do have a family plan now but the pricing page hasn't been updated. 🙁 I'll get that fixed.
@annahavron wow! Your professional work is vital for society. I think Micro.blog should hire you as a consultant. Or maybe as a community manager (when @jean retires, and I hope she doesn't any time soon).
@annahavron Luddites' Corner, that sounds like a good one that I would read. I like all the dogs and cats too, as well as the birds.
I would prefer the tinkerers off the Timeline just because there are so many of them. I have to scroll and scroll and scroll before I find anything useful to read. It takes too long. Maybe I should drastically cut back on the number I follow. I could just unfollow those who are clearly tinkerers.
Keep up the good work, Anna. 🙏
@pratik I put into secular language a lot of what I do as a parish pastor. A lot of affiliative groups online and offline deal with the challenges of working with communities of volunteers who may come together for one thing but differ over just about everything else. How do you hold the community together when they cancel out each others' votes, find different things interesting or funny, and have wildly different priorities? That's a question anyone who works with groups of volunteers repeatedly coming together to do hard things over time, has to answer.
Another thing I do is work to communicate clearly to people with widely varying education levels, life circumstances, and tech resources. This covers everything from translating ancient texts (and, I hope, making them revelant -- to children; and also to people in their forties, fifties, nineties); to writing up information that allows people to take action immediately after reading it.
The latter is harder to do than it seems, because you've got to step out of the knowledge you have, and ask yourself (and sometimes others, because it's so hard to see the gaps when you know what you know) what information is needed, to allow someone new to it, to act. You also have to give them enough information to self-sort.
You have to equip people with the information they need to act,; or to realize that this particular event or program is not for them.
In our case, let's say I want you to have all the information you need to empower you to show up (if you're willing and able) to help us pack food for school kids who might otherwise go hungry over the weekend.
If you've never heard of our backpack program to send food home with school kids who might otherwise go hungry over the weekend, I've got to make sure the announcement includes the following bits of information: what the program is; why this is worth your time (over 40% of kids in our community come from food-insecure households); what specific actions are needed before, during, and after a packing session (can you help pack food in bags? drive it to the schools? collect grocery bags to double-bag at home? etc.) ; what materials if anything you need to bring to be able to participate (maybe a valid driver's license); time and place of our next packing session; whom to contact if you have questions, and, yes, their contact information right after their name so you can text them immediately if you want to.
If any of those pieces is missing, a reader may not be able to act. We want them to be able to act on it -- to know all they need to know, in order to be motivated, prepared, and present.
So the things that jump out to me about micro.blog are how it builds community, and how actionable the information here is for someone who has never heard of it and might want to act on it: set up a blog and participate in an unusually civil online community.
@jean and @manton have done incredible work building up a healthy, life-giving community. This never happens by accident; it's the result of deliberate structure, and intentional culture.
What I'd like to see in the future is for the help and onboarding information to become more immediately actionable to a wider variety of people, perhaps even for someone who thinks "git" is what you say to a varmint rooting up your carrot patch.
As a non-engineer though, I don't know how realistic this hope of mine is. Perhaps it can't be simplified further. I don't know.
@annahavron Brilliant, Anna! Here in the Midwest, the most common use of "git" is when the retiree on his front porch yells out at the kid, "Hey kid, git off my grass or I'll come out there and move you off my grass myself!"
😜
