Can’t shake a comment that someone liked Micro.blog but it didn’t have many features. Blogs, themes, plug-ins, social network, podcast hosting, read-later bookmarks, cross-posts, archiving, highlights, email newsletters, bookshelves, IndieWeb, fediverse… Missing: marketing.
@manton I have found it hard to navigate Micro.blog to a) find what I need, b) discover what it can do, and c) find it in language I understand. What's missing for me is an organizational structure to the service where it's easy for me to understand what you're offering, in "how to" language I can use.
@manton clearly Micro.blog has many features – just not the one(s) they were interested in.
I'm curious what they mean by "marketing"? Seems like a pretty broad term that could mean a lot of things to different people.🤔
@manton Also: it's not about features. It's about doing the one thing that deeply meets a need. People who think it needs to do more more more don't have a matching need - or, more likely, are just nitpicking for the sake of it.
@annahavron Thanks, that is a big problem... We've never had a great way to expose different features so people know what they can use. Need to spend more time making what is there easier.
@evankstone Oh, to be clear "marketing" was my term. I want to do more to get the word out and explain what we have.
@manton If someone threw together a concept for a revamped marketing-y home page or about page, would that be helpful?
(I'd love to be the "someone" there, but I also don't know that I actually can any time soon.)
@manton Maybe you need a marketing expert. I know most of us are bad at it, afraid of doing what we don't want: hawking and quackery. Having a unique story that make those features into a tasteful and useful product in people's minds is not easy.
@manton @annahavron I think it’s not marketing per se. You need a good technical writer who can reframe the features you already (there are enough) in ways for different audiences. But you have to first decide what audiences you want to attract. You can’t make everyone happy. That’s usually what VCs want.
@manton Certainly more could be done to help folks better understand the features that Micro.blog offers.
But I think the perception of Micro.blog lacking features might be based more on the timeline experience. Because, frankly, the timeline experience of Micro.blog is very simple. On the one hand this simplicity is a positive for many and it's by your intentional design. There's a slowness and calmness about Micro.blog which is partly due to the interface but also perhaps a much smaller, more uniform community.
The web interface of the timeline, like the two apps I'm familiar with, gluon and the official app, are fairly simple. My use of the word simple here is both a positive and negative. On the positive side, it's calm. The timeline presents the user icon, name, post and the option to reply.
But compare it to Mastodon as that seems the most relevant at the moment. The Mastodon timeline, be it in the browser or one of the apps, is much busier because each post offers more options. Reply, boost, favorite, bookmark, share and then the 3 dot "more" menu. So, right off, the timeline of Mastodon is both more complicated but more feature rich. Add to that a larger, more diverse community and I think the overall experience there feels more lively with more options for interactions.
Mastodon is closer in features and interface to Twitter in that it has those additional timeline elements. What many might call stickiness. From the Micro.blog design philosophy (based on my limited understanding) these are viewed as negatives. But that busier timeline is what many people prefer.
For someone used to Twitter or Mastodon, the timeline of Micro.blog probably does seem to be lacking in features. Again, to emphasize, that's the timeline of the website as well as the timeline presented by the two iOS apps.
I wonder, how often do people venture from the timeline over to the blogs behind the timeline? I know I'm much more likely to stay on the timeline. It's only when I tap/click over to individual blogs that I get that more visually interesting variation of design and a reminder that oh, yeah, there's a blog here!
@jeannie You're right, onboarding is mostly nonexistent... We've improved a couple things recently for new accounts but there's nothing like a walk-through of where everything lives. Of course, we don't want to overwhelm new users either. 🙁
@Denny That's interesting. Yeah, we're purposefully less busy. Many of the blog features are also understated. It's a balance between discoverability and not getting in your face all the time.
@manton The Micro.blog homepage might benefit from that list of features, and a short explanation of each.
@manton the mind is so weird. The comments here are just a small fraction deserved praise of the amazing things you and the community provide and yet we can still have that one comment that sticks out.
@manton I agree—
“Stickiness” is what is needed along with some way of understanding and discovering all the features.
I’m especially puzzled at the choice to make the Discourse threads into a help site and not just make a wiki site for a knowledgebase. It’s a bit difficult in terms of feature discovery. For example, I had no idea I could use the M.B app as a read later service until I saw that by bookmarking posts, an RSS feed was being generated and I can subscribe to that right In Vivaldi. Awesome stuff!
Better yet, make an actual help microblog using something like Docsy theme and show off the power of micro.blog at the same time?
As far as marketing, focus on the #MastodonMigration types and let them know of an alternative. Especially those that might be more into long form tooting or are already into writing/musing/photo and video blogging and want to have more control.
Also think about cross posting partnerships with others in this space. Pixelfed/Peertube is one that would interest me for example because I like making pictures and video to go along with my text about places and people I’m blogging about.
@manton ...but nobody has to walk through a walk-through, right?
But it's nice if one exists, that you could walk through, if you wanted to. A directory.
How could I easily find Micro.blog "how to" information on: podcasting, bookmarks, highlights, archiving, newsletters?
I agree with @pratik that this is also about technical writing. An email series is a nice option for some folks, but as a user I tend to want a structure to a site so I can look things up for myself, as I need them.
An easily navigable site which explains what the various features do and how you can use them, is less overwhelming for me personally, than more messages I don't have time to read, or look for later.
Just some thoughts as I procrastinate from what I'm really supposed to be doing right now... 😅
@johnbrayton YES exactly - or a prominent link to a page that lists additional features; if you don't want that on the home page.
@jlg Using Discourse for help remains a questionable decision. At the time, we had a dedicated help site and we had Slack. I wanted to shut down Slack and use the opportunity to have a single place that was easy to maintain and use. Going forward, we may also use welcome.micro.blog more. I don't like having so many disjointed places (chat, forums, wiki, help, blogs!) but we may have gone too far in simplifying.
@annahavron @manton The main feature I'm working on for the 2.0 update to @TIL is literally this (reference guides, basically). That's obviously no good to anybody right now but hopefully enough of the community-made projects can add up as a counterweight to these issues.
@manton Marketing and commerce seem to be the focus of SquareSpace and I am rethinking where i. I want to be.
@manton I'm guilty of this. Original backer, mostly used it as a twitter cross-poster, only now investigating using it as the home of my (long form) blog and mastodon account and am shocked by what’s possible. Though I don't feel like what I was missing was “marketing” (but then, people are never conscious of the best marketing…), but rather some “pro” mode or, especially, a manual.
A pro switch I could flip that would make everything in the post UI explicit — long post toggle, blog selection, categories, feed filtering, mastodon name, crossposting options, static page editing, etc. (even if they’re grayed out when prereqs aren't met) would provide a great overview of what’s achievable.
Or a manual. The discourse page is really valuable, but doesn't actually provide a narrative for what’s possible and how. If I wanted to sit down and read about everything micro.blog is capable of, I don't know where I'd go for just, like, a list of that.
Finally, I still don't have a good mental model for how micro.blog works or the technologies it’s built upon, and I don't know where to find out about that. I understand that for a lot of people, having these details abstracted away is a huge plus. But for that particular group looking for “features”, understanding how micro.blog leverages RSS or IndieWeb… stuff would provide a baseline intuition for what should be possible even if not explicitly enumerated somwhere.
@manton That comment just doesn’t compute. Micro.blog offers a tonne more features than many similar platforms, not even taking into account the community of bloggers.
@manton Part of why I signed up for Micro.blog was it’s lack of marketing focus. The web is more than internet hustles and people posing as brands.
I (almost always) agree with @annahavron: an onboarding site that people can browse to find answers, and you can point to, is a focused solution that would solve a lot of the problems you mention.
I’m not just speaking hypothetically either. The reduction in places to look for information has been more of a help than a hinderance. I just coded my own custom theme by mostly using help.micro.blog for answers. That didn’t happen because of marketing, it was great people in this community sharing their knowledge. Let’s tap into that.
@pimoore @manton I know I've told Manton this privately and I believe publicly... Micro.blog doesn't do a very good job at explaining the many many features it does have. It isn't an easy task... a small team, mostly made up of builders. I think 3 months of very little building and mostly communicating via a new marketing website, help section, etc. would be worth the investment.
@gregmoore @cdevroe @annahavron @manton
“That didn’t happen because of marketing, it was great people in this community sharing their knowledge. Let’s tap into that.”
This right here, there’s a vast amount of knowledge within this community. I started with zero knowledge of Hugo templating (and limited CSS), and also tapped into the help forums and had a blast contributing themes.
@starrwulfe Thanks, I hadn't seen Docsy before... I'll have to experiment with that. Even if we don't use it, it could help someone else.
@manton interesting thread … I particularly like “you don’t need marketing … what you need is ….” And then goes on to decribe something that is actually part of marketing.
I won’t weigh in with ‘what you need’ … because that is defined by ‘what you are trying to do’.
That said, I do pretty much agree with all the suggestions … now … to riff on Eric Morecambe … you have all the right elements … all that’s left is in which order do you do the work.
Meanwhile a totally unrelated related post I wrote back in November.
@manton Depends on what your goal is. As a product guy I found this workshop pretty useful (led it also with my team) -- it does not have to be taken too seriously, however it does provide mechanisms to understand what you want your product to be and from there what levers you want to pull (if you care abt it) to move your product.
>> Using Discourse for help remains a questionable decision. At the time, we had a dedicated help site and we had Slack. I wanted to shut down Slack and use the opportunity to have a single place that was easy to maintain and use. Going forward, we may also use welcome.micro.blog more. I don’t like having so many disjointed places (chat, forums, wiki, help, blogs!) but we may have gone too far in simplifying.
I totally understand; I’ve had to deal with this disjointedness in project and support documentation in my current job as a support and process engineer (and before as a journalist too!). Coming from an #Indieweb perspective — those areas are silos of information 😏
Freeing up those silos and making one authoritative source of help and support information is vital to any customer facing operation. Especially when you can begin to answer questions with a link from It. People then get used to just heading to the docs and get their issues handled. Throw those docs into a Git repo and let others add to it as new issues and fixes happen — the community stays involved which is the reason why most of us are here.
>> Thanks, I hadn’t seen Docsy before… I’ll have to experiment with that. Even if we don’t use it, it could help someone else.
Let me know if you need help massaging documentation as well; it’s been my day job for years.
@manton I learned about Micro.blog years ago, only realized I had a good use for it a few months ago. A better funnel would certainly help keep the lights on :)
@manton For me I think one of the most confusing factors for new users might be the disconnect between a blog hosted on Micro.blog and the profile page. I understand why it's like it is but even as a long time user I still get tripped up by it sometimes. For example I can't follow you on Micro.blog from manton.org, I have to click on also on micro.blog and follow you there. That's added friction and feels a bit broken.
From a UX perspective I think the left nav could do with some "clean up"… it's not clear what's for my blog and what's for the social network because everything is kind of on the same level. I look at your feature list and see a number of "products". The social network (timeline, mentions, discover, replies, fediverse), the blog (posts, pages, themes, cross-posting, email newsletters, podcasts, archiving), bookmarking (read-later, highlihgts), and bookshelves. Those seem like marquee features and might help with marketing/onboarding/navigation.
@philbowell In the left sidebar, it's divided into 3 sections with a little extra spacing and icon colors: social, your blog, and other account stuff. Maybe too subtle! 🙂
@starrwulfe.xyz Just remembered that the original help.micro.blog was a Jekyll blog on GitHub, because I thought people could fork and edit it, but it didn't work out in practice. Maybe something more wiki-like is the way to go. Hmm.
@manton I like micro.blog precisely because it's simple, without a lot of unnecessary hooptedoodle.
It's also true that micro.blog is not suitable for everything. It's not a commercial blogging platform--I would not recommend micro.blog to someone trying to create a marketing blog/website, and Tumblr is better for sharing found media (GIFs, memes, etc.) But micro.blog is a great personal blogging platform.
@manton awesome if you can figure a way to use micro.blog to wiki micro.blog somehow. Meta-dogfooding is always cool
@manton I agree completely that there is much opportunity for m.b here. A new home page with a "Your home on the Internet" kind of heading, with "read, write, talk, listen, share" subheadings that describe all the features. An updated plans comparison table could roudn it out.
